A Youtube Curation: Two Contrasting Conversations

 This post goes out to all those people in radio land who already like long form interviews, podcasts etc.

I don't know about you, but my experience of Youtube, pinterest and other algorithm driven social media is that once I engage with anything I am given the impression of the algorithm that it works on a principle of 'Oh you like x then here's ALL THE x.' and yeah, granted, sometimes like if I listened to a great song on Youtube or saw a great piece of art on Pinterest, what I do want is more variations on the same theme. 

An easy distinction, I feel, is if I am consuming an aesthetic good or an intellectual one. So Pinterest doesn't bother me that much apart from the asymmetry of saving one pin will fill my feed with similar ones, but hiding a BILLION astrology or christianity memes is required to convince it I am not interested in astrology or christianity. Particularly not the pinterest meme versions of those subjects.

Anyway, this preramble is already too long. Point is, when consuming intellectual content - like arguments, long form interviews what I am most interested in and Youtube least likely to proffer to me is a contrary point of view. I would love a feature that was like 'people who hate this love that'

Spoiler - I don't think I've succeeded at creating a manual alternative to piercing algorithmic bubbles. It's a lot of work to find someone to say something that will actually make me reconsider a position I am first persuaded to. What I can curate is the contrast between a conversation that is fascinating and one that is interesting. So I present to you two conversations and I'll put my actual thoughts in a white font below to give you every opportunity to judge these convos for yourself without having me poison the well. You can highlight the white text with your mouse and it will be readable.

I do want to stress though that in curating this, both long form interviews are worth watching. They were worth my time, and if you have the time to dispose on a bit under three hours of content, I feel they may be worth your time. 

Conversation 1:

Conversation 2:

Thoughts in White:

I like this pairing that I would characterize as fascinating vs. interesting. They prompt me to look up definitions, for example 'fascinating' means 'extremely interesting' which would mean that conversatio 1, which I'd describe as 'fascinating' is the superior...but looking at the etymology of 'fascinating' seems more in line with the intuition that drove me to distinguish the two conversations in this way. From the Latin 'fascinum' meaning 'spell' or 'witchcraft' where by contrast the etymology of 'interest' is a bit more complicated~

late Middle English (originally as interess ): from Anglo-Norman French interesse, from Latin interesse ‘differ, be important’, from inter- ‘between’ + esse ‘be’. The (last) -t was added partly by association with Old French interest ‘damage, loss’, apparently from Latin interest ‘it is important’. The original sense was ‘the possession of a share in or a right to something’;

And that's the thing, I find the first conversation to be populated by big ideas that are kind of untethered. Exercises in our imaginasium. The second conversation is tethered it takes a problem and attempts to ground it in 'what are we actually dealing with?' 

In that sense my temptation is to regard the first conversation as 'radical' and the second conversation as 'stoic' which again in turn prompts me to look up the definition of 'radical'

Radical turns out to mean 'of the root' or 'fundamental'  and that's where I get confused. The reason for my confusion is that I would regard the second conversation as also 'radical' in the sense that they are using a scientific method to investigate the roots of the problems of male violence. By contrast, the first conversation I feel I could make the case with confidence exhibits behavior from which it is reasonable to infer a kind of willful ignorance as to what drives the problem.

But, I've tentatively refined my understanding of what 'radical' means when people identify as 'radical' (previously I just let this wash over me) and it does make sense of the meaning of the word - it means people who see the solution as just uprooting everything. I may be employing a kind of confirmation bias but for me this thought shores up my own generalization of the left-wing political camps - those who view history as essentially arbitrary: the world looks as it does for no particular reason, the butterfly effect or something, and as such we could just wipe the slate clean and organize the world in any way we like. Then the other camp I don't have a name for, its certainly aligned with stoicism, methodological naturalism, the scientific method etc. which is that history is non-arbitrary, even if it isn't understood.