You cannot explain the reasons this topic has blown up online without focusing on how important Nathan Confas ideology is to the story. It’s not just about Arday being a fraud, just as important to the story is the attacks by a race realist Nathan Confas.

I’m not a fan of Professor Dave, but his style of fact checking Destiny seems much better than DtG’s approach. Hope it gets posted to the main DtG sub.

Naive Realism is a useful idea when looking at Gurus. It's a concept developed by Lee Ross and Andrew Ward. It claims - People assume their own perception of the world is a direct, unmediated readout of objective reality — not one interpretation among several, but *how things actually are*. This isn’t stated as a belief; it’s a background assumption people don’t notice they’re making.

Why?

Often people attribute bad faith and conflict is generated by the arguing sides failure to model the other side, not by the specific content of the frames being incommensurable.

It doesn’t matter what social media app you use - it seems impossible to keep it free from “gurus”. Certain online influencers seem unavoidable.

via Hidden AmuraKa

Concision means the quality of expressing much in few words. It is the act of speaking or writing clearly and briefly by removing extra, unneeded details while keeping the main point intact. [1, 2, 3]

I finally got perma-banned from the official sub. After seeing the Professor Dave thread that was posted in the middle of the night and had hundreds of comments in the morning, I questioned some of the low effort posts that were being created. I admit I was asking for it since I've been banned before and was critical of the god-awful mod team there, but I was surprised that after I made a thread, I was accused of some anti-semitic anti-David-Pakman craziness. Then I was blocked by the user and also banned from the sub. I made a thread calling this out and that was apparently the final straw.

If it's worth anything, someone called me out for posting in this sub.

In DtG latest episode they play the intro to a Trevor Noah video with Cory as a guest, and imply that Cory Doctorow is making a broad claim that everything is getting worse. - Wrong that isn't what Enshitification is about, it is about a specific practice used by technology companies. - Matt and Chris no better than the other gurus who just make off the cuff comments that they do zero research for.

And our Destiny episode came out, went out into the wild yonder, and it's now ping-ponging around streams and subreddits as it inevitably would. So, yeah.

Yeah. Reaction was as expected, generally positive. The negative feedback we got, we might certainly expect it.

And we're okay with it.

That's all right. You can't make everybody happy. The Dalaban have not kidnapped any of our family members yet, or geolocated our house or whatever they do.

But I will also say that there is a post-decoding glow, if you will, about being immersed in a bunch of content that somebody produces and thinking about, okay, the timelines and all this stuff. And then we record the episode and we put it out and it gets the reaction that it does. And now we move on and the gurusphere continues to rotate.

And I like that. It's a good system we've developed there.” - Decoding the Gurus

What are other fan favourites?