What is The Intellectual Dark Web?

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I said retained - that if you're in with a dogmatic group of people you get ejected for not being dogmatic enough. Pretty much what you just said, just from the other direction - that it would be a really bad idea to challenge one's beliefs if that was what one's peer group looked like.

I get it, so its hard to transgress too far from the dogma of a group you claim membership whether left or right...(or any other dimension)

It's one way purity spirals are a bad thing. When I mentioned that Jonathan Haidt brought up Emile Durkheim in his lectures, Durkheim is a 19th century French social philosopher who is best known for first pointing at how people and groups of people would lift religious motifs and modalities out of religion-proper and use those same motifs in other places. A lot of people have been commenting about both the far left and right getting religious in their politics lately.

I assume both sides see benefit from invoking religious legitimacy for their party.

IMHO it's worse - plenty of people make all kinds of money with both sides going at each other.

spoils of war

Get your facts straight - I didn’t create the thread, I responded to Pepe. But then I guess an old person can’t be expected to understand the internet

As I said, the IDW name is very misleading because they’re not a dark web. They have nothing to do with the actual Dark Web.

The Dark Web is something I support. But most of the IDW is a combination of dumb people who say edgy things, and smart or at least academically successful people who say dumb things when they leave their specialism.

First of all, the dumb person: Dave Rubin has repeatedly allied himself with white nationalists such as Stefan Molyneux and Lauren Southern, describing Molyneux as being part of his “new centre ground” for example. This isn’t just him embracing free speech and letting all views points be heard, as he very rarely allows guests on his show to raise liberal or leftist viewpoints on his show. He believes the BBC and the Washington Post are “fake news” but has no problem with white nationalist media or Fox News. He’s an alt-right grifter.

On Jordan Peterson, he first became famous when he falsely claimed that Canada’s law prohibiting transphobic hate speech would mean criminalising people who accidentally use the wrong pronouns when referring to someone. Since then he has received further attention for saying that:

- there is “something wrong” with women who aren’t mothers before the age of 30

- sex outside of marriage leads to sexual assault

- the state should prevent sex outside of marriage

- the Disney film “Frozen” is reprehensible feminist propaganda

- Islam is incompatible with democracy

- Ancient Egyptians knew the structure of DNA

- praising Viktor Orban for standing up to political correctness (Orban is restricting academic freedom, which is supposedly what Peterson is most concerned about)

- lobsters displaying hierarchical behaviour proves that humans need hierarchies

Some of that is bigoted crap, while some of it is just plain bizarre crap. And on top of it all he has a tendency to speak in very vague generalisations and then deny that he meant what he said.

Eric Weinstein is like a very diluted Peterson. He believes that he has created the Theory of Everything and that physicists are just choosing to ignore him (he believes similar things about his brother’s contributions to biology). He “has questions” about 9/11. He believes Jeffery Epstein did not kill himself. And he has the same problem as Peterson in that he spends a lot of his time not really saying anything at all.

So people take a whole bunch of people who say various controversial things that are not always in congruence with each other and put them in one category and give them a name.An edgy controversial name intended to be edgy and controversial.

So now we have neologism,the intellectual dark web.Does any of this make sense,I don't think they can be put in one category if there not in conspiracy to teach or promote the same ideals.It is true that in a conspiracy the left hand doesn't have to know what the right hand is doing,they must be acting in the furtherance of a common cause.I don't see that happening here.

It's my opinion the IDW is a fictional entity.

Eric Weinstein was at a public event with Sam Harris (one of Sam Harris's live shows before an audience) in early 2018 and Eric coined the term 'Intellectual Dark Web'. He did it in a tongue and cheek way and did it with a specific effect in mind, not taking seriously any idea that he and other people he might have had in mind for this label, or anyone else who'd get thrown in later by the public like Michael Shermer or Joe Rogan, were part of some clandestine group. I think he admitted that he wanted to sort of launch some turn of phrase that could encapsulate what they were doing as different, at the same time edgy enough to pay attention to (ie. it's a deliberately click-bate name), and it's mainly because he believed - as did many others in the group, that they were staking out a position on current events and the current state of institutions that was both highly important and not being discussed.




It's not a conspiracy, just like Eric Weinstein isn't a fictional person nor is Bret, Heather, or Sam.

I'd give the same recommendation I gave to earlier to someone else - go listen to a bit of The Portal or Making Sense and you can get a feel for what the topics of interest are.

I said it's not a conspiracy,there just people with controversial opinions lumped together,and I never said they were fictional people.I said the IDW is fictional,not the real people accused of being part of it.

Where in this post did I say the IDW was a conspiracy,I said the opposite.
And nowhere in this post did I say the people accused of being part of the IDW were fictional,I only said the IDW as a thing is fictional.

Did you read my post? I clearly explained that this isn't a label that got thrust on them by people who didn't like them. I actually posted the Sam Harris event where Eric Weinstein, spokesman and founder for the group, coined the term himself.

You were saying, as far as I could tell, that the people who were calling this group a conspiracy coined the term 'Intellectual Dark Web' to cast aspersion on them. Eric Weinstein coined the term 'Intellectual Dark Web' therefor that's not correct. I placed a video in the post which has Eric and Sam on stage, with Eric raising the suggestion and explaining its context somewhat.

I had not noticed that,so people put the label on themselves,this gets more bizarre by the moment.I don't watch video's or TV programs by any of these people,about three or four of these people Iv'e heard of but never heard the expression intellectual dark web.Does everyone in this so called organization embrace being called that or just the founders you mentioned.