The Unnatural Selection podcast is produced by Jorge Tsipos, Adam Direen and Tom Heath. Visit the Unnatural Selection website at www.UnnaturalShow.com for stuff and things.
The views expressed are those of the hosts and their guests and do not reflect those of any other entities. Unnatural Selection is a show made for comedic purposes and should not be taken seriously by anyone.
He painted a picture of radical teachers “indoctrinating” kids into “political activists,” then promised a swift rewrite of the National Curriculum to banish bias, despite being unable to point out what (if any) parts of said curriculum were too woke, or even what ‘woke’ means. Students and union groups promptly freaked the fuck out, warning that even vague threats to slash education spending on this basis risked undermining classroom autonomy and free speech… which, yeah, of course it does. That’s the point. This is the same LNP that said free speech was so important that people “have the right to be bigots,” yeah?
On 1 May, with some voters already at the polls, Dutton told reporters flatly that he, in fact, had “no proposals” to change the curriculum after all. Cue shadow ministers insisting the Coalition remained committed to “getting back to basics,” whilst being coy as to what “basics” actually are. What this, and many other Dutton backflips during this campaign, tells Australian voters is more or less what they already intuitively know: the spud is not ready for prime time.
Donald Trump many times vowed to restore “common sense” during his election campaign by gutting “CRT” from schools, leaving many families wondering what, exactly, ‘critical race theory’ had to do with AP Physics (Hint: Nothing!). Florida’s Ron DeSantis went further, banning an Advanced Placement African American Studies course for alleged “indoctrination,” only for the academic board to point out the disputed topics were historically vetted. Book bans and lesson-plan overhauls followed nationwide, framed as common-sense fixes to “activist” curricula. Because if there’s one thing we can all agree on, it’s that Americans have too much darn book-learnin’.
This approach helped sweep Donald Trump back into the presidency, but these tactics simply don’t fly with the Australian electorate, partially due to that still-semi-functional educational system I mentioned earlier. If anything, Dutton’s allusions to wanting to emulate Trump’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’, cut 41,000 public service sector workers and enforce ‘return to office’ mandates have made (enough) Australians realise that this is not the kind of reactionary politics that we want to import from the US – resulting in a 5 point swing against the LNP over eight weeks. It also doesn’t help that Jacinta Price started yelling “Make Australia Great Again!” next to Dutton at a press conference. You can see the moment his little heart breaks – aw! A comment that Price (and I shit you not) ‘does not realise’ that she said. Babe, we have it on tape? Why deny it?
What this looks like (and frankly, what it is) is a leader who is morally and ideologically bankrupt; a man who is willing to say and do whatever reactionary nonsense he thinks will get him into power. It worked great when he was just in opposition, punching down on Anthony Albanese is easy (and fun!), but when it came time to articulate a comprehensive, costed, positive policy vision for Australia’s future, he’s been found completely wanting.
Hopefully, enough Australians realise this that on May 3rd, they will choose at the ballot box to permanently return the potato to managing his $300 mil property portfolio – clearly his true calling in life.
Lets get one thing straight, I don’t like RFK Jr. He’s a liar and a charlatan who’s spent decades grifting and lying his way into one of the most critical, heavily resourced portfolios in the USA; the position of Secretary of Health and Human Services, which overseas a budget of 1.8 trillion dollars. Yes, that’s trillion, with a ‘t’—more than the GDP of… well, most nations on earth.
So, with my cards on the table, I want you to know that I am not here to give the man a Fox News ‘Fair and Balanced’ appraisal. This article is a partisan hit piece. A hatchet job. A People’s Elbow to his solar plexus of his bullshit. I am not trying to be impartial. Don’t ‘@’ me.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appeared on Dr. Phil this week for what was less of a hard-hitting interview and more of a hot stone massage with a happy ending – to discuss various topics, marking the 100th day of the Trump administration (yay..). You’ll be unsurprised to know that he spouted a lot of ‘facts’, that are total bullshit. His approach seems grounded in a reasonable perspective to the untrained ear: food dyes, chemicals, and pesticides are in our foods, and that’s no good for us. Let’s get rid of them. Make America Healthy Again! Who could argue with that?
The problem is he’ll mention real things like ‘vanishing choloric density’ – where you eat processed foods and don’t receive anywhere near the same level of satiation (the ‘I’m full’ feeling) that you would get from eating an apple, for instance – in the same breath as health figures that he’s pulling out of his arse. No, Robert, 35% of American teens aren’t “diabetic or prediabetic”. Maybe he saw the stat that “352,000 Americans under age 20 are estimated to have diagnosed diabetes, approximately 0.35% of that population,” and confused .35% with 35%, maybe he’s just off by a magnitude of 100 – but I honestly think that’s giving him far too much benefit of the doubt. Having diabetes and being potentially pre-diabetic are two radically different cohorts of people, and by framing it that way, it exaggerates the numbers to suggest something entirely different. And when he doesn’t have manipulatable facts to hand, he just fucking lies.
And yet he touches on something that we know to be the case: obesity and the dearth of natural, unprocessed foods are a growing concern in the US and other developed nations. The rate of pre-diabetic teens is increasing at an alarming rate. One only needs to read the book Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us to see how radically large processed food companies have stacked the deck against consumers for profit. It’s not a secret.
You can read at length about the perfect level of chip crunch that food scientists at Frito-Lay have worked out to ‘enhance mouthfeel’ and trigger the ‘bliss point’ (4 pounds per square inch, by the way) or how preservatives are added to food simply to increase ‘shelf life’ to improve profitability by reducing wastage. Many moneyed interests are at play, spending billions of dollars on advertising and R&D to make sure you jam their chocolate bar down your mouth as frequently as possible – it is not a fair fight.
That’s all real – you don’t need to lie about that.
The problem is RFK Jr is a pathological liar and bullshit artist – he can’t help himself but to spew a slew of scary, real-sounding ‘facts’ that any journalist (a real one, not Dr Phil, please) would be unable to rebut in real-time, due to their sheer volume. He’s practised at this, and he’s been doing it for years. It sounds accurate when he says it. Here’s a good use of AI: have a crawler underneath the footage of RFK Jr talking that live fact-checks his nonsense. You’d finally break the machines once and for all. It might be the only way to fight them. Or better yet, stop putting this grifter on TV.
And then, as it always does with old mate Robbie, the conversation turned to vaccines.
RFK Jr. emphasised in response to a viewer’s question that parents should “do their own research” on vaccine safety, as they do with researching baby food and prams. This statement is problematic for several reasons, not the least because (I am now realising) most people don’t know how to do actual research.
What most people know how to do is Google things, look on social media and… that’s about it. I’d wager that most Americans don’t know what PubMed is, let alone how to read it; what ‘statistical significance’ means, or what ‘p-values’ are. Unless you’ve got the benefit of a tertiary education, how would you know these things? Why would you want to know these things? They’re so very dull.
Unfortunately in our world, the truth is often behind a paywall, whereas the bullshit is entirely free. So what usually ends up happening is people ‘do their own research’ and uncover significant numbers of ‘sources’ of influencers and bloggers that simply mirror their existing prejudices and cognitive biases back to them – all of which are algorithmically boosted by multinational internet platforms to keep you scrolling. They are not incentivised to tell you the truth, they’re incentivised to feed you what you want so you keep scrolling and they can serve you more ads and make more money—a system designed for clicks, not truth. At a certain point, even well-intentioned people declare epistemological bankruptcy and give up on the ‘knowing things’ project altogether.
The second issue is that researching medical treatments inherently differs from researching which pram to buy. Whilst in the latter case, reviews from ‘mommy-bloggers’ might actually help you select the right pram for your needs – it always helps to have an unbiased third party to review a product and share their thoughts and experiences – their learnings will not be helpful in the field of vaccine medicine. Because in all liklihood they don’t know shit about fuck.
This is why we have medical research. So people who have spent decades studying a specific subject matter, inside and out, can examine double-blinded controlled studies and determine the evidence’s preponderance. These results are then published and reviewed by other experts incentivised to poke holes in the research if it’s methodologically lacking. Other scientists can also replicate these experiments and verify or disprove the results. It’s the scientific method. It’s how we built knowledge in a repeatable way. It’s the only way to really create knowledge. Is it perfect? No, the system is vulnerable to bad incentives, liars, and cognitive biases – see the Replication Crisis in psychology for an example. Still, it’s the best method we have for generating consensus claims, such as: the MMR vaccine is safe and effective. Except for a few specific circumstances, all kids should have it.
The problem with people like RFK Jr and all the other grifters like him is that they engage with this bad-faith cat and mouse game with the truth. He never gets on TV and screams ‘run for your life, vaccines are going to kill your kids, ahhhh’ because a) that would look crazy, and b) it would be less effective than his current strategy, which is to sow doubt. It also doesn’t help when you have Dr Phil laundering this charlatan’s reputation by going on and on about RFK’s supposed rock-solid commitment to ‘gold-standard’ science. He’s a doctor after all; he must know! The TV man wouldn’t lie; he was on Oprah!
It’s this bullshit of ‘just asking questions’ under the guise of ‘testing’ vaccines to ‘ensure that they’re safe and effective’ which I find infuriating. Vaccines are safe and effective because we have decades of evidence to prove it. Simply by repeatedly posing the question and asking parents to do their own research, RFK Jr is not-so-subtly undermining the concept of vaccination in the viewer’s mind. By emphasising every parent’s ‘right to choose’ for their kids, RFK Jr legitimises both sides of that choice as equally valid, which they are not.
In the context of the U.S. experiencing its largest measles outbreak in 25 years, it is unconscionable to be injecting doubt and creating a permission structure for parents to act in ways that are damaging to the collective, especially when it’s based on deliberately distorted facts and junk science. RFK Jr.’s comments will undermine public trust in vaccines and vaccination efforts, as they are intended to do. They will undoubtedly result in the unnecessary deaths of thousands of people during his tenure in the administration.
Eryk Salvaggio, an author who writes extensively on AI and technology, claims, “What people care about isn’t whether something is true, but how it makes them feel.” Stephen Colbert first identified this right-wing phenomenon on his show The Colbert Report with a term: Truthiness. This term intends to satirise the right wing’s obsession with adopting positions which, while they aren’t true, certainly feel like they should be true to the adopters. A short-sighted willingness to live in their reality, even if it doesn’t comport with the facts.
The unfortunate reality is that many Americans (hell, many Australians) are either so poorly educated or so insulated within their own algorithmically generated news environments that truthiness is no longer a punchline; it’s now driving a trillion-dollar department of the US Government and resurrecting a disease that in the year 2000 was declared eliminated. Who knew Dr Phil could suck harder than he already does?
The Unnatural Selection podcast is produced by Jorge Tsipos, Adam Direen and Tom Heath. Visit the Unnatural Selection website at www.UnnaturalShow.com for stuff and things.
The views expressed are those of the hosts and their guests and do not reflect those of any other entities. Unnatural Selection is a show made for comedic purposes and should not be taken seriously by anyone.
The Unnatural Selection podcast is produced by Jorge Tsipos, Adam Direen and Tom Heath. Visit the Unnatural Selection website at www.UnnaturalShow.com for stuff and things.
The views expressed are those of the hosts and their guests and do not reflect those of any other entities. Unnatural Selection is a show made for comedic purposes and should not be taken seriously by anyone.
The Unnatural Selection podcast is produced by Jorge Tsipos, Adam Direen and Tom Heath. Visit the Unnatural Selection website at www.UnnaturalShow.com for stuff and things.
The views expressed are those of the hosts and their guests and do not reflect those of any other entities. Unnatural Selection is a show made for comedic purposes and should not be taken seriously by anyone.
The Unnatural Selection podcast is produced by Jorge Tsipos, Adam Direen and Tom Heath. Visit the Unnatural Selection website at www.UnnaturalShow.com for stuff and things.
The views expressed are those of the hosts and their guests and do not reflect those of any other entities. Unnatural Selection is a show made for comedic purposes and should not be taken seriously by anyone.
In his article for Forbes, AI contributor John Winsor describes his experience with ‘vibe-coding’, a new methodology of creating digital content, which is done chiefly through AI tools rather than coding directly. The article describes the author’s emotional high of creating a 3D platform game entirely via Claude’s Sonnett tool. From developing the original concept to defining the game’s visual style and even dictating specific mechanics and kinds of controller inputs. Within a half-hour, John has created a game that wasn’t:
…anything close to cinematic quality but the model nailed the mechanics of the game. The game included a skier hurtling down a snowy mountain, maneuvering around obstacles, competing against rival skiers, and featuring multiple difficulty levels, comprehensive score tracking, and even camera controls to zoom in on the action.
The piece is framed as an interesting description of the kind of creative endeavour such tools can unlock and the efficiency gains they can provide for game developers.
I am, however, concerned by the logical conclusion that Windsor implicitly drives us towards in his piece: the idea that nobody needs to ‘know’ any underlying hard skills; AI can ‘wish’ the desired output into existence. We’re hurtling towards a kind of ‘Idiocracy’ future rather than a creative utopia, where there is no need to develop underlying expertise as the LLMs will happily serve it up to us on a plate.
Without developing the underlying skillset, I think it’s unlikely that someone could serve as an effective ‘art director’ (as Winsor euphemistically calls it) for an AI-coded game because they won’t understand the principles of good game design. I like the idea of freeing people from limitations to allow them to create more effectively, but I think what will likely result is the proliferation of a lot of really bad games. This is disappointing because there are already so many really bad games.
Hard work makes an artist good at their craft. The doing of the thing, combined with substantial repetition, makes your output considered and, therefore, good. I often find myself writing about a topic I’m considering, and it’s in the writing of the topic that I uncover what I think about it – because my first impressions rarely stand up to the interrogation that engaging deeply with any subject entails. A senior game developer could undoubtedly use a tool like Claude effectively to code games, but it eliminates the need for junior developers. If there are no pathways for junior developers to one day become senior developers, then the industry’s talent pipeline never gets created in the first place.
I don’t think Windsor is correct; the piece doesn’t demonstrate how the “lines between creativity and technology are blurring.” What I think it proves, perhaps without realising it, is that AI, combined with the imperative of maximising shareholder value, is on the precipice of potentially destroying an industry whose output I value.
There is no scenario under our current shareholder capitalism model in which the popularisation of this technology does not result in (further) mass layoffs of creatives from major game studios, which is now at risk of being hollowed out entirely.
Consider The Verge’s recent story about Ashly Burch’s character, Aloy, from the Horizon series. A recent video leaked from Guerilla Studios, which produces the series, showed Alloy being voiced and performed solely by AI and was not trained on any of Burch’s performances. However, the studio insists this is “not necessarily something that’s in production for actual games.” That ‘necessarily’ is doing so much heavy lifting in that sentence that I hope it’s bending its knees.
I love this industry and this art form so much and I want there to be a new generation of actors. I want there to be so many more incredible game performances.
I want to be able to continue, to do this job, and if we don’t win, then that future is really compromised.
Sure, this AI-enabled future is interesting, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little concerned.
I’m certainly not against the profusion of tools that democratise access. In principle, I think that’s generally a good thing. I have been noodling (unsuccessfully) with a podcast and a YouTube channel for years. Something that could only be possible when consumer-grade audio-visual tools filtered down to the public in the early 2000s. Before that, in my Dad’s day, for example, a video editing suite would run into tens of thousands of dollars and would (necessarily) only have commercial uses. Hell, I used Grammarly to help me refine this very article, and that’s essentially an AI tool at this point.
I would argue, however, that the vast (vast) majority of the creators on YouTube, and any other open-source platform, for that matter, are absolute trash. This is not an argument for prohibiting access to the tools; it is simply an acknowledgement that democratising these tools will enable the profusion of mountains of utter dross. There will be some diamonds in the rough. Still, given the absolute firehose of quantity over quality that’s certain to materialise, I think the ability to parse them will be even more difficult than it already is. The unfortunate consequence of this is that the creative output will be less valuable to the market than ever.
We’ll have to use AI to filter out the AI dross. What a time to be alive.
The Unnatural Selection podcast is produced by Jorge Tsipos, Adam Direen and Tom Heath. Visit the Unnatural Selection website at www.UnnaturalShow.com for stuff and things.
The views expressed are those of the hosts and their guests and do not reflect those of any other entities. Unnatural Selection is a show made for comedic purposes and should not be taken seriously by anyone.
The Unnatural Selection podcast is produced by Jorge Tsipos, Adam Direen and Tom Heath. Visit the Unnatural Selection website at www.UnnaturalShow.com for stuff and things.
The views expressed are those of the hosts and their guests and do not reflect those of any other entities. Unnatural Selection is a show made for comedic purposes and should not be taken seriously by anyone.
