One thing I haven’t talked about (perhaps even haven’t considered) enough is the “no man’s land” that separates rational media from irrational media. [1] This is nothing new. Shakespeare quite obviously invented “new” (and improved?) words. Strings like “Anthropic” and / or “Perplexity” might be meaningful to you (or not) primarily depending on which linguistic communities you decide to belong to (or not). Personally (as I tried to describe last week — see “Indigena Revisited“), when a string becomes registered as a government-sanctioned trademark, it likewise becomes disqualified as a part of “natural language” (because the governments enforcing trademark laws thereby create corporate monopolies for deciding the meanings of those terms — which are by definition not shared concepts) … and therefore is banned from the realm of rational media. If your views on language differ from mine, then perhaps we simply don’t belong to that same linguistic community (yet we might still belong to other shared linguistic communities).
Since I’ve so adamantly gone out on a limb with respect to these issues (and I feel I have probably taken what other people might consider to be an unpopular — or even iconoclastic — stance on these matters), I felt sort of obligated to watch a recent interview between Joe Rogan (who vehemently endorses “Perplexity” [not only, but also, as a sponsor of the podcast]) and Aravind Srinivas (co-founder and CEO of “Perplexity”). I’m glad I did.
The only thing that’s required to be a good scientist is intellectual humility, to understand that you could be wrong about things, things that everyone takes for granted — you could still question them, and when you’re presented with new evidence and new data you are willing to change your mind, and you are willing to operate with ambiguity and uncertainty about the world, … that’s basically all the qualities you need to be a scientist.
“Scientific Qualifications: What Aravind Srinivas feels Science demands from (Good) Scientists” [ https://podcasts.video.blog/2026/07/05/scientific-qualifications-what-aravind-srinivas-feels-science-demands-from-good-scientists ]
I recommend watching the entire interview, and I say that even though I disagree with many statements Aravind makes (such as his answer to Joe’s question of “why America?” being “it’s hard” — personally, I feel a more adequate answer would have been “it’s risky”).
For the most part, I agree with many of the things Aravind says (compare, for example, what I said just last week about the way the entire artificial intelligence industry will turn the world into ashes and dust with Aravind’s remarks about power consumption / energy usage). Note that in my humble opinion the first hour and 22 minutes can easily be skipped without missing any discussion related to artificial intelligence — so if you’re short on time, I invite you to “cut to the chase”.
Happy trails! 😀
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