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much for your support. All Right, so I got turned
onto this piece by a listener who sent me not
the link because they knew I don't open links, but
they sent me the title of the piece at Psychology Today,
and the headline is the natural selection of critical Thinking
and the Socratic paradox. This is this is barn Burner
type of material, like that headline, Like if I haven't
captured your attention with that headline. Now, this has practical
implications and it connects to the two previous hours topics,
the stuff we've been covering with the doge and the budget.
And it is this critical thinking and I'll just refer
to it as the author here. Christopher Dwyer, PhD refers
to it as CT Critical thinking CT and he says
it isn't about knowing something or not knowing it. Okay,
because you hear all the time we should be teaching
our kids how to think. Right, we should be teaching
not what to think, but how to think. We need
to teach critical thinking skills. Right. You hear that a lot.
So what does that actually mean? Because it does mean something,
And it's not just simply knowing something or not knowing
a thing. It's about knowing the difference between the two.
It's about understanding that here are the things you know.
Not to get all Donald Rumsfeldy in here, but there
are known knowns, there are known unknowns, right, and there
are unknown unknowns, things that you don't even know that
you don't know. And recognizing that there are those things
that you don't know. That's part of critical thinking, and
that part is missing. That is missing from a lot
of people's analysis, in their social media posts and their
arguments online or in person. Right, there is this either
inability or a refusal to accept a premise that you
don't know everything. And I know it sounds very basic,
but there is no way to know everything. It's about
knowing the difference between what you know and that you
don't know stuff, and then applying certain thinking processes to
efforts towards gaining that knowledge. You have to acknowledge what
you don't know. I refer to this as trying to
see all of the angles, and one of the angles
is always that I don't know. And you hear me
say that. I will say that a lot of times.
I don't know. I'm not aware of this. All I
could tell you is what I'm seeing based on what
I'm seeing, and this is what it looks like. But
you know, in the first hour with the topic of
the Ukrainian mineral rights deal that has apparently been struck
between the US and Ukraine, right, people thought they knew,
they knew what was going on, they knew what Trump meant,
they knew everything about everything when it came to Trump's
efforts with Ukraine, and I don't how could I. I'm
not at the White House, I'm not talking to Donald
Trump about it, I'm not in the negotiating room. I
have no idea. So that's a huge blind spot. So
I can just look at, you know, what's being reported
public statements, and then with today's development that there is
some deal, right, and I just caution, give it a minute.
That's what I was saying in the first hour, just
with all things in Trump world. Just relax, have some patience,
let's see what happens, because that really has been I
think the lynchpin problem in trying to assess what is
happening in a Trump administration is that Trump says something
or does something, or one of his people says something
or does something, there is this immediate, you know, flood,
the zone of overreaction. There is on wide spread ascribing
of motive to Trump, right, he's Putin's puppet and all
of that, and not just him but everybody around him.
So there is a projection onto people about what is
motivating them to do these things? Why? Because you don't know,
you don't know why they did that, So you're going
to assume that you know, or if you're a reporter,
you're going to go to somebody and ask them what
they are assuming is the motivation, and then you'll print that.
But that doesn't make it true either. You have to
acknowledge what you don't know. Unfortunately, that's not very common.
People don't like to acknowledge that they don't know something
or a specific thing. I don't know why Donald Trump
is doing that. And I know I frustrate people when
I encounter them, you know, out out and about. I'm
at some event or you know, go to a restaurant,
run into people or whatever, and they ask, you know, oh,
what's going on with this? Why are they doing that?
And they are dissatisfied with my response, which is, I
don't know, unless like I do know, But most of
the times I don't know why somebody is doing what
they're doing because I'm not in their head and I
haven't talked to them. All I can tell you is
that this is what they did. So what do you
think it means? This is Dunning Kruger, by the way,
the Dunning Kruger effect, by the researchers Kruger and Dunning.
That's why it's called the Dunning Kruger effect. I think
it's alphabetical. But this was a research project that they
did where they put a whole bunch of I think
they were students. They were like college students. They ran
him through a test and they tested everybody and then
they asked them at the end, how do you think
you did? And that was the real expct PM. It
wasn't the exam questions, it was what did the students
say when they were asked to give their prediction on
how well they did? And what they found was that
the kids who did the best on the tests thought
they did the worst. So when you asked them afterwards,
how do you think you did? Those kids that tested
the best, they always said, or virtually always said, I
don't think I did very well. And the kids who
scored poorly the worst, they were like, oh, I think
I did all right, I did pretty good. Oh I
feel confident. They had a higher expectation of how well
they did than the ones who actually did well. Why
because the kids who knew more of the material knew
that they didn't know stuff, and the kids who didn't
know the material they had no idea what they didn't know.
That's Donning Krueger. There are more people, sorry, there are
people who apply critical things thinking right. There are people
out there that do it, and there are some who
don't do it at all. And this guy, doctor Christopher Dwyer,
says that used to frustrate him that some people don't
do it at all, and so he made it sort
of his mission to, you know, get people to think
critically in all of this, and he's now come to
a place, a better place. He's just like, not everybody's
going to do it. Not everybody's equipped to do it,
and people don't want to do it. And that brings
us to so Crates aka Socrates and a thing that
he calls or it's called the Socratic paradox. And Dwyer says,
I always thought Socrates was a bit of a badass.
He didn't care what people thought about him. He stood
by his intellectual integrity, and he was killed for it. Ironically,
perhaps it's because of what people thought about him that
he didn't care. Simply they didn't know anything. Socrates thought
at length about knowledge and the knowledge of others. He
knew that he didn't know anything, but neither did anybody else,
according to this take on the Socratic paradox, when engaged
with the oracle of Delphi, who told Socrates that he
was the wisest person in Athens, Socrates believed the oracle.
But how could a man who knows nothing says he
knows nothing be the wisest man. Socrates concluded that if
he knew nothing and was wiser than everybody else, then
it must be due to him being the only person
in Athens who recognized their own ignorance. Right. That's the
key is to be humble enough to recognize I don't know,
and this takes us to a thing called the narrative fallacy.
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Psychology Today, Peace by doctor Christopher Dwyer talks about He
mentioned the Socratic paradox, where you know, Socrates goes to
the oracle of Delphi and the oracle says you're the
wisest person in Athens. But Socrates is like, yeah, but
I don't know anything, and so therefore I believe the oracle.
Why is that it's a paradox, right, No, because he's
the only one that recognizes he doesn't know everything that
makes him wise, that makes him the wisest. Then there
is a thing called the narrative fallacy. Daniel Cannaman the
late Daniel Caneman. He wrote of the comforting conviction that
the world makes sense, and it rests on a secure
foundation our almost unlimited ability to ignore our own ignorance.
The comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on
a foundation that we ignore our own ignorance. Dwyer wrote
about humanity's desire, in the midst of their information processing,
to try to tie things into nice, neat little packages.
This stance is well reflected in what we know about
narrative fallacy. When events occur in the world, we often
think in terms of a narrative chain to make sense
of it. Why, because we dislike uncertainty, We want closure,
we want explanations for things, and so we fill in
the gaps. Narratives provide a cause and effect story for
what happened. And I've said this many times. Stories are
very powerful things. They have been passed down the entire
human existence from person to person. We still know stories
that were told thousands of years ago because they are
so powerful. So narratives give us a cause and effect
tale for what happened, A linear sequential means of processing
of information that helps us to remember it, to understand things,
or some other application. But it's a nice, neat little story. Unfortunately,
most of these stories are fictionalized accounts of what might
have been a real event. If it's not just straight
up a fictional story, right Aesop's Fables and such. But
if it's a story that is based on a real event,
the story the account gets fictionalized, and then we implicitly
fill in the gaps with our own thoughts, our own feelings,
our own attitudes when the information is missing. So then
we start drawing links that may not exist, and this
tendency creates a barrier to understanding. Sometimes random events are
simply that they are random. This actually gets to a
lot of conspiracy theories. This is not to say conspiracies
do not exist. I'm not making that argument. I would
not make that argument. I don't believe that to be true.
They do exist. However, I've said this for a very
long time too, which is that when people are presented
with the truly frightening reality that sometimes a few people
can do very bad things and impact many many others.
Nine to eleven is a very good example of it,
people do not want to believe, still do not want
to believe that nineteen guys with box cutters could murder
that many people, that they could do something like that. Right,
So people fill in gaps. This is the narrative fallacy,
because that's the way our brains work. We want a neat,
nice little story from point A to point B. Tells
me the story, and if there are gaps, I'll fill
them in, And by filling them in, it makes me
believe that I know what actually happened. And you see
it right now with so much of what is occurring
with Trump and the Trump Derangement syndrome sufferers, they are
filling in gaps, right, They don't know something, so they're
going to fill in the gap that coincidentally, you know,
abides by their biases and now they know and that's
comforting to them. All Right. If you're listening to this show,
you know I try to keep up with all sorts
of current events, and I know you do too. And
you've probably heard me say get your news from multiple sources.
Why well, because it's how you detect media bias, which
is why I've been so impressed with ground News. It's
an app and it's a website and it combines news
from around the world in one place so you can
compare coverage and verify information. You can check it out
at check dot ground, dot news slash Pete. I put
the link in the podcast description too. I started using
ground News a few months ago and more recently chose
to work with them as an affiliate because it lets
me see clearly how stories get covered and by whom.
The blind spot feature shows you which stories get ignored
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Your subscription then not only helps my podcast, but it
also supports ground News as they make the media landscape
more transparent. Alan with a tweet. It's a pet tweet,
Alan says, are you are you saying, Pete that you
don't know what's in Donald Trump's head? Did you not
have the forethought to bug the Resolute desk? How short
sighted are you? Apparently there that's a thing now, So Alan,
this is actually I saw this story. So people on
the left have been criticizing Elon Musk for bringing his
son to the Oval Office a couple of weeks ago
for that that press availability with Donald Trump, and Trump
is sitting at the Resolute desk and Elon Musk's kid
is there with Elon, and you know, he's kind of
walking around and he's being a what is he like
three years old or something? He's a toddler, okay, and
so he's obviously, you know, he actually was very well
behaved for his age. And at one point he starts
picking his nose and they're like the left and the media.
But I repeat myself there, they're all like, oh, he
wiped his nose on the on the on the Resolute desk.
They had to send it out to clean the desk
and all of this. Now, I don't know if that's true.
See there it is again. I recognize. I don't know
why they had to do this, but apparently the report
is that they sent the Resolute desk out for a cleaning,
and the narrative that people filled in was because Elon
Musk's kid besmirched it. So let's say, Okay, However, there
is another theory that I have seen out there as well.
I saw this yesterday. They keep sweeping the premises for bugs,
not insects, listening devices. They're they're trying to make sure
that the Intel community is not spying on them, and
that's why they sent the desk out. Imagine that along
those lines. Oh, I know that could never happen, right, No, No,
I would never do such a thing. Yeah, of course
they would. Nick Arama over at RedState dot Com. The
FBI has now reportedly opened an investigation because now it's
under new management, right cash Battel along with the soon
to be Deputy Director Dan Bongino. The FBI has reportedly
opened an investigation into a honeypot operation. This is a
honeypot operation. Is These are operations. They are, you know,
plans to try to entrap Winnie the Pooh aka Jijenpingg
of China. That's what a honeypot is. No, No, I'm
just kidding. Now. It's where you use an attractive person,
usually a female, to seduce or at least you know,
flirt with, in order to lead on a target, usually
a dude. And you get the dude to say stuff
and do stuff and compromise him, and then you use
that against him, right, you use that to turn him
if he's an agent or something, and you make him
a spy or get him to wear a wire whatever.
That's a honeypot. It's a trap. Right, Oh, look at
this honey and then you wander into it. And now
now we got you, you know, all right, So the
FBI is looking into a honeypot operation that was launched
by the FBI against Donald Trump in twenty fifteen. According
to The Washington Times, a whistleblower has revealed to the
House Judiciary Committee in a detected disclosure that this was
an quote off the book's action run by anybody, want
to guess James Comy, then FBI director James Comy off
the books. And this goes to something that I have
long been perplexed by. Do you ever watch a show
like the example I always give on this, but there
are many, many examples, but the one I always use
is Blacklist with James Spader, Right, And you know, these
these types of shows, it's usually uh, you know, it's
like some intelligence group or whatever inside the FBI or
uh you know, inside a police department or something. It's
like some highly specialized unit, you know, and the show
is all about this one unit, and they are the
ones that are always involved in every single high profile case, right.
And Blacklist was notorious for this because like they were
dealing with the most uh you know, I don't know,
threatening and you know, international global terrorist kind of thing
and attacks on the leadership of America and all this
other stuff, the worst criminals in the world, dealing with
the you know, the biggest operations and all this stuff.
And the unit is like four people, right, which is
weird to me because, like I see all these other
people working at computer stations in the background, but they're
never brought into any operation. It's always these four, four
or five of them, right, And like whether it's you know,
going undercover to try to get somebody or it's kicking
in the door on a raid, they're always at the
front of the swat team, even though like they're the
least protected. They got like one vest on and they're
running point through the door. And it's it's like I
get it from a TV perspective, but it's it's it's
not realistic, except of course, with the leadership of the
FBI apparently in DC, where there was like four people
and they ran all of the high profile investigations. Is
that a coincidence? Is that weird? Like why is you know,
struck Page, McCabe comy, this one group and they're always
the ones that are running point on the investigations into
Hillary Clinton servers, right, and Donald Trump's sex or the
p tape or whatever. Right, they're always involved in these cases.
It always comes back to them. And here's another one. So,
according to the whistleblower, two female undercover employees infiltrated mister
Trump's twenty sixteen campaign at high levels and were directed
to act as honey pots while traveling with mister Trump
and his campaign staff. The Trump campaign, I will tell
you knows who these people are. There is zero doubt
in my mind they know who these two women are
zeroed out because they are now the FBI is now
looking for these two undercover operatives. This was not a
part of Crossfire Hurricane. That was a different operation. Okay,
This whistleblower, this agent quote personally knew that Comy ordered
an FBI investigation into Trump, and that Comy personally directed it.
The investigation did not appear to target any specific crime,
but was more of what agents would describe as a
fishing expedition to try to find anything incriminating that could
be used against mister Trump. The whistleblower said, according to
The Washington Times, that the undercover operation was obscured from
the Justice Department's own Inspector General, Michael Horowitz, which might
be why he never knew about it, which once again
raises the question, what the hell are we even doing
with all of these inspectors general in all of the
agencies when they never find this kind of thing. Quote.
The case had no predicated foundation. Sokomy personally directed the
investigation without creating an official case file in the FBI's system,
so you wouldn't know. According to the Times, one media
outlet actually had a picture of one of the women,
but the FBI told them, oh, no, no, no, that's an
informant and if you publish the picture, it'll it'll get
or killed. So don't publish the picture. And after that
story or after that that conversation about, you know, the
publication of that of the photo, the operation, the honeypot
operation got shut down. According to this report, one of
the people is at now the CIA, and the other
got a promotion and is now a quote high level
FBI executive in a major field office. Like I said,
the Trump campaign's got to know who these two women are.
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So here's a pete tweet from rh This is just
a whole bunch of letters taxing the wealthy, right, Oh,
this was about the proposal to increase the tax on
the endowments for colleges going from like one and a
half percent up to twenty one percent, taxing the wealthy right,
isn't that what the Democrats want? Pay their fair share
in all? I would think so, Karen says, I think
it says a lot more about these women were unsuccessful
at compromising the people in the high levels of Trump's
staff or Trump himself. I only say that because no
information that would have been available was leaked. I don't
actually know if they were successful or not. There's no
indication either way on that. I have no idea what
what info they may have gleaned or if it didn't,
you know, stuff didn't work. I don't know, but they had.
They had obviously infiltrated the campaign to some degree. I
don't know to what extent. Eric says the media is
complicit until they start burning sources that are caught lying.
I agree. Russ says, I kind of feel like the winners,
or sorry, the whiners who are not on board with
the Doge mission, who have been sandbagging and leaking to
the media that leaving isn't going to be isn't going
to bog down the Musketeers the way they think it will.
I mean, this was their job before Elon was there,
and look how much they accomplished versus the new guy. Okay, yeah,
well not so much. Let me see here. I had
a message also from Chris. He says, in keeping with
the FBI director's tradition, I wager three to one odds
that James Comy wears dresses. All right, Well, too soon, Chris,
Too soon, Bob says. We engineers think in terms of contingencies,
which often result in critical over design specifications. I count
my training in both engineering and contract law as great
bases for critical thinking. Most students find these disciplines too hard,
thereby resulting in their not even suspecting what they do
not know, aka a life filled with blind side setbacks. Right,
this is I will tell you, Like in out side
of the office, here, I participate in well, let's just
say it's a it's sort of it's a board. I'm
on a board, okay, And and in talking with people
on the board, I have to keep reiterating to my
fellow volunteers that, like, just because I am identifying a
potential thing, a criticism or a concern, because like they'll like,
some proposal will come forward and They're like, this is fantastic.
I don't know why anybody would be against it, And
so what I try to do is like, well, I
could think of a reason why somebody might be against it,
and here's the reason. And then they start arguing with
me as if I'm taking the position, and I'm like
I said, I'm and I've had to say this, like
repeatedly over the years, like I am not arguing for
the position. I am simply pointing out that there are
potential other views out there that we have to kind
of keep in our heads. That there might be some
legitimate concerns that people could raise. You could disagree with those,
that's fine. But to say that there's no opposition or
that everybody would agree with you because this is a
fantastic idea or something like that, that's not true. There's
probably somebody with a differing opinion, and so we should
maybe try to consider that, or you know, try to
get more people into the mix to help us ascertain that.
I don't know, I just I mean, that just seems
obvious to me. And again that's not me taking a position,
that's me simply saying that there might be other people
with other positions that we don't know, we couldn't possibly
know all there is to know where we have to
recognize that our own knowledge base is limited, and in
my case, severely so on most things. But I appreciate
you listening anyway. All right, that'll do it for this episode.
Thank you so much for listening. I could not do
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