argument clinic

The classic Monty Python sketch in which a man visits an Argument Clinic to buy an argument. It is a wordplay-heavy bit about contradiction versus real argument.

The classic Monty Python 'Argument Clinic' sketch, lightly trimmed, in which a man pays for an argument and gets contradiction instead.

An interview with Nick Bostrom at Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute presenting his simulation argument: at least one of three propositions about posthuman civilizations and ancestor simulations must be true.

Jon Bois tells the story of a 2008 bodybuilding forum thread in which users spent a weekend arguing over how many days are in a week. It is episode six of his Pretty Good series for SB Nation.

An Innuendo Studios Alt-Right Playbook episode about a rhetorical tactic of dismissing partial fixes to problems. It frames this as a style of argument that treats flaws as unfixable facts of life.

A short Mayo Clinic clip of an infant in intensive care with severe whooping cough, held by her mother. It shows the baby's violent coughing.

Stanford professor Robert Sapolsky lectures on depression as a real biological disease. He covers its biological and psychological causes, how it differs from ordinary sadness, and ideas such as learned helplessness. He ties these together into one account.

Kurzgesagt makes a selfish case for improving the world, arguing that helping people far away raises prosperity and innovation for everyone, including yourself. The animated video frames this as egoistic altruism and positive-sum cooperation.

Innuendo Studios' video from the Alt-Right Playbook series on how bad-faith actors control the conversation through debate tactics and moving goalposts.

A Ninja Nerd whiteboard lecture on the Moderna, Pfizer/BioNTech and AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccines. It covers how each works, the preclinical and phase I-III trial process, and Operation Warp Speed.

George Hotz gives a SXSW 2019 talk on the idea that we live in a simulation and asks what actions would be available from inside it. He takes a hacker's view of whether it could be escaped.

An Innuendo Studios video essay from the Alt-Right Playbook series that uses the Seinfeld 'the card says moops' scene to explain bad-faith argument tactics. It describes how reactionaries use sincerity and irony as shields in online debate.

A short video from a blacksmith, who heats and bends steel to rebut the claim that jet fuel could not weaken the steel in the World Trade Center. It is delivered with a lot of attitude.

A VICE News report on the 2017 protests at Evergreen State College, including the confrontation involving professor Bret Weinstein.

Numberphile's James Grime explains Cantor's result that some infinities are bigger than others, including why the reals outnumber the integers. It is a short, accessible introduction to countable and uncountable infinity.

A Daily Show with Jon Stewart segment from 2014 covering the People's Climate March in New York and a House science committee struggling with basic global warming facts. It mixes satire with an argument against climate denial.

Psychologist Irving Kirsch gives a distinguished lecture on antidepressant trials and the placebo effect. He argues drug-placebo differences are small outside severe depression.

Philosopher Jeffrey Kaplan summarizes Peter Singer's 1972 essay 'Famine, Affluence, and Morality', arguing that failing to give to save lives is morally comparable to letting a child drown. It is a short lecture on the argument's structure.

Lex Fridman interviews Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb about the interstellar object Oumuamua, aliens and black holes. Loeb lays out his argument that it may be an artifact rather than debris.

Stanford's Christopher Gardner presents his large, long comparison of four popular diets under real-world conditions, in which the lowest-carbohydrate Atkins diet came out on top.

John Searle's Talk at Google on consciousness and artificial intelligence, hosted by Google's Singularity Network. He presents his philosophy of mind and Chinese room argument that computation is syntactic and cannot capture semantics.

Ben Felix rebuts common arguments for holding only US stocks, such as past outperformance and international revenue exposure. He supports the case for international diversification with cited academic research.

A BBC Question Time clip in which Ian Hislop argues against capital punishment, rebutting the deterrence argument. He points out the problem of executing innocent people.

A Philosophy Tube video essay on data, surveillance and the algorithms built on personal information, touching on Cambridge Analytica and the 'nothing to hide' argument.

The first episode of Michael Sandel's Harvard course on moral reasoning, opening with the trolley problem and the choice between killing one to save five. Sandel draws out student arguments and introduces utilitarian and other approaches to justice.

Not Just Bikes argues that self-driving cars will worsen sprawl and car dependence and harm cities. The video compares car-centered and people-centered urban design and weighs what cities should do instead.

Tom Scott explains why electronic voting is a bad idea. Elections must be trusted by everyone and attacks on software scale in ways attacks on paper do not, so open source or blockchain fixes do not solve it.

Lawrence Lessig's Talks at Google presentation based on his book Republic, Lost, arguing that money in politics corrupts Congress and eroded public trust, and outlining what could be done about it. It supports the argument with data on political donations.

Not Just Bikes introduces the "stroad", a street-road hybrid common in the US and Canada that fails at both jobs. He contrasts it with Dutch design, where each road has a single purpose, and covers cost, danger and ugliness.

Moxie Marlinspike's DEF CON 18 talk on changing threats to privacy argues that surveillance arrived through convenient services and network effects, so opting out is not a real solution. It also includes his framing of getting social democracy rather than the fascism people feared.

Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob) traces the history of software from 1948 to today, looking at the problems programmers faced, how they were solved, and what mistakes the profession made. He then projects where the field is going, including professionalism and regulation.

Daniel Stone, a longtime X and Wayland developer, explains at linux.conf.au 2013 why X11's design became untenable and what motivated Wayland. The talk walks through X's history and accumulated cruft.

Not Just Bikes explains the Strong Towns argument that car-dependent American suburbs cost more to maintain than they generate in taxes. It describes the growth Ponzi scheme that props up municipal finances.

In this TED talk, Lawrence Lessig argues that American politics is corrupted by Congress's dependence on funding from a tiny fraction of citizens. He uses rapid-fire visuals and calls for a bipartisan push to reclaim the Republic.

CGP Grey explains why European diseases devastated the Americas while few deadly diseases traveled the other way. He ties it to livestock domestication, dense cities, and the ideas of Guns, Germs and Steel.

Brian Will makes the case for procedural programming over object-oriented programming, arguing that OOP's promised encapsulation and decoupling are largely illusory. He analyzes real code examples and the problems of tying data to behavior in classes.

Jack Diederich's PyCon 2012 talk argues that classes are overused in Python and walks through real code, refactoring away unnecessary classes, exceptions and modules. It popularized the heuristic that a class with two methods, one being __init__, should be a function.

A one-hour 2019 KOMO News documentary hosted by Eric Johnson on Seattle's homelessness and drug crisis, with interviews and looks at proposed solutions including a drug court program in Rhode Island. It argues addiction and mental illness are at the core of the problem.

Jim Keller gives a UC Berkeley EECS colloquium arguing that Moore's Law is not dead. He surveys upcoming technologies and the multiple innovation curves that can keep transistor density and performance scaling.

Jonathan Blow's DevGAMM 2019 talk argues that software knowledge is being lost between generations and that growing layers of abstraction could lead to a decline in technological civilization.