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Decoding the Gurus

Interview with Neil Levy on Intellectual Virtue Signalling

Decoding the Gurus

Christopher Kavanagh and Matthew Browne

Leisure, Social Sciences, Society & Culture, Science

4.21.2K Ratings

🗓️ 27 September 2022

⏱️ 117 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Fellow decoders: a few weeks ago Chris and Matt were invited to virtually attend a lecture at Macquarie University that promised to be of interest for the podcast. And that lecture was presented by the philosophy professor Neil Levy on the intriguing topic of 'Intellectual Virtue Signalling'. That is the status-seeking advertising of what is commonly perceived as intellectual virtues. We found Neil's thesis extremely compelling, with clear applications to a lot of the stuff we observe week on and week out on DTG. So, naturally, we swallowed our pride and our eternal disdain for philosophy and begged Neil to grace our humble show with his presence. Neil kindly agreed and we proceeded to have an enjoyable conversation with our patented meandering waffle juxtaposed against Neil's careful philosophizing.

Before the interview, we also spend a little bit of time spelling out our policy on being abusive to the gurus. Here it is in summary: Don't do it! Robust criticism, ok. Personal abuse/doxing, is not ok. Got it? Good!

Prof. Levy holds a dual position at the Faculty of Philosophy at Oxford University. He publishes not only in practical ethics and moral philosophy but also across diverse topics in cognition, addiction, and pathology. Neil has also written a number of books, most recently:


'Bad Beliefs' is directly related to the podcast, and is available freely online!

We heartily recommend this interview, and might even go so far as to say Neil has helpfully provided us with a bit of conceptual framework that undergirds some high-level stuff that's happening within and across the quantum circuits of the Gurometer. Thanks for that Neil!

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Thank you. Oh, Hello, welcome to Dakota the Guru's the podcast, we're an anthropologist and a psychologist

0:29.4

listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to understand what they're talking

0:33.6

about. I'm Professor Matt Brown with me is a associate Professor.

0:37.8

Kavanaugh. Good day Chris, how you doing today? I'm all right. You look rambunctious and I probably people can hear have the

0:47.9

lingering vocal effect of post illness.

0:54.0

You do, you do.

0:56.0

You got through it okay.

0:57.0

He got through the old COVID okay, hey?

0:59.0

Yeah, yeah, just like lingering, what's that word?

1:04.0

A lingering Malays?

1:06.0

Yeah, that's it, so, but...

1:09.0

It could be long COVID.

1:10.0

You could have long.

1:11.0

Well, it's not long enough yet so maybe it's just my natural feeling and I forgot

1:17.6

about that yeah I don't feel a hundred percent but I feel like 95% there by so you know that's all right.

1:26.6

Yeah for everyone out there younger than me that's how I describe being 46 just a constant

1:31.5

lingering malays.

1:33.0

That's just normal.

1:35.0

It's my baseline.

1:36.0

I thought you were saying 95% of your peak.

1:39.0

Wow, that's optimistic.

1:41.0

But you know, that's all right. So yeah, so Matt the term is upon us in Japan at least new

...

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