Ask Me Anything #18

You're far better off being vaccinated and eventually catching COVID as you will than catching it without having been vaccinated. Catching COVID is not a strategy for becoming immune to COVID; it's just catching COVID. And those who survive will have some natural immunity. The jury is no longer out on that score.

The reason why I don't want to do a podcast with Bret and Heather is the same as why I wouldn't do a podcast with a 9/11 truth conspiracy theorist or Alex Jones or anyone in that world—because there's a basic asymmetry, which is very hard to overcome.

Reality doesn't care about the color of your skin or your biological sex or the gender with which you identify or the religion into which you were born or the cult toward which you were lured from some shopping mall. And if we play our cards right, the future won't care about those things either. But the question is, how do we get to that future with our world intact?

There is no reason to think that Ivermectin is a surrogate for getting vaccinated, and there's no reason to think that people should be terrified of getting these vaccines. And that is the message that Bret [Weinstein] is spreading hour by hour by hour.

This increasing commitment to moralizing and politicizing everything is becoming authoritarian. It is stifling dissent. It is punishing thought crime. And it has provoked an exodus of smart people from mainstream institutions.

To suggest that our current problem with [COVID-19] variants has anything to do with vaccination seems a little bonkers because the biggest problem, the Delta variant, emerged in India and became prevalent there under conditions where exactly no one was vaccinated. We know that the emergence of Delta has nothing to do with our vaccination regime.

I generally think about civilization as a machine for engineering and safeguarding certain experiences. And it seems to me that it has barely started running in earnest. I mean, we've had a few thousand years of real culture and a few hundred years of anything like scientific rationality and then merely a few decades of leveraging all this with information technology.

Are the robots coming to our rescue, or they coming to kill us? It's hard to know from here.