Special Episode: Interview with Stuart Ritchie on Hunter Gatherers in the 21st Century, covid skeptics, and bad science
This week we have an engaging interview with the scientist, author, and public science communicator Stuart Ritchie. Stuart wrote the excellent 'Science Fictions: Exposing Fraud, Bias, Negligence and Hype in Science' and is a prolific advocate fr better science and more nuanced public discourse.In this episode we start of by discussing Stuart's recently published review of Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying's new book 'A Hunter Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century'. Was Stuart a fan and is now an acolyte of Weinsteinian lineage theory? Tune in to find out.Also, for those who enjoy 'challenging conversations', robust discourse, and regularly shop in the marketplace of ideas, there is an extended discussion on whether we have been a little bit too kind on the government and public health institutions. Stuart uses facts and logic and attempts to DESTROY us, so come and get your well earned vicarious catharsis but be prepared for plenty of postmodern deflection. We've learned from the best.LinksStuart's Review of Bret & Heather's new book at the GuardianWebsite for Stuart's (Excellent) Book: Science FictionsAnti-Virus: The Covid 19 FAQ Website'How the Experts Messed up on Covid' at Unherd by Stuart & Michael Story'How Covid Skeptics were duped by the Wonderdrug Ivermectin' at New Statesman by StuartChris' Tweet-thread Chapter by Chapter review of Stuart's Book (use the hashtags to find the rest)Kevin Bird's Tweet with an extract from B&H's bookThis Week's SponsorCheck out the sponsor of this week's episode, Ground News, and get the app at ground.news/gurus.
Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try our best to understand what they're talking about.
I'm Matt Brown and with me is Chris Kavanagh.
How's it going, Chris?
Matt, you're a professor.
Did you forget your important titles?
I mean, what's going on?
You trying to keep it casual this week?
Yeah, playing it cool this week.
Playing it cool.
What the listeners...
Can't see is that when Matt started this, he had on a Hulk Hogan-esque bandana and he's taken it off and now has like a dark brown kind of crazy professor hairstyle.
So maybe just calling yourself a professor would be too much.
That's why you held off, I guess.
Well, I'm rather proud of my hair.
I'm growing it long and I'm hoping to achieve.
And vertical.
And vertical at the moment, thanks to the beanie I was wearing.
But I'm hoping to achieve a Weinsteinian mop, a bouffant.
Oh, that is a unique hairstyle.
You know, that might be the hairstyle of the 21st century.
Do you call beanie's monkey hats?
Like, do you know what a monkey hat is?
No, no, that's not a thing.
That's a Northern Irish thing, at least.
We call them monkey hats.
That's ridiculous.
I don't know why.
Well, is it, Matt?
Is it any worse than Beanie?
Well, I suppose it's not as bad as Australian place names, which sound famously unusual to foreigners' ears, but make perfect sense to us.
Wool bollocks cape and whatnot.
Sprang bejang.
His dance creek and things like that.
Cultural relativism is where it's at, Matt.
Don't be judging other people's cultures.
Oh, well, speaking of cultures, sticking to your own culture, which is what you and I always try to do.
It's a very good idea.
Yeah, there's a bit some surprising support against, what is it?
Cultural appropriation, food appropriation, coming from an unexpected border.
Well, hold your horses, Matt.
You know, there's a dark horse.
It's a caliphane ride event that we need to introduce.
So this week's episode, we're going to be talking to Stuart Ritchie about a wide variety of things.
He's going to try and prove us wrong about stuff that he believes, but he'll be crushed by the end of the episode of The Quivering Mass.
You have to be ironed.
Yeah, or he'll destroy us.
You be the judge.
You be the judge.
It's a contentious back and forth, rip-roaring interview showing The diversity of thought available on Decoding the Gurus.
Different flavors of grey are available.
That's right.
Yeah.
So part of the thing that we're going to be talking to Stuart about is he's written a review for The Guardian on Brett Weinstein and Heller Heying.
People have pointed out I say Heller Heying.
I can't remember.
Anyway, their new book about...
The 21st Century Hunter Galler's Guide.
Now, we're not going to talk about that because we talked about it in length in the episode.
But something that's happened since then, which is quite funny, is that an extract from the book was shared on Twitter by Kevin Bird.
And he took a little clip.
I'll just read it.
This is one of the bullet points, a kind of guide that comes at the end of the chapter.
So consider your ethnicity.
And look to its culinary tradition for a guided diet.
If you are Italian, look to Italian cuisine for clues as how you should eat.
If you're Japanese, look to Japanese cuisine.
In particular, look to the culinary traditions of home cooking, as the foods represented in restaurants, while often delicious, often represent only a sliver of a culinary tradition's full panoply of options.
I love that.
I love it.
Yeah, the florid language.
A panoply of options, Matt.
A panoply, yeah.
And it's a lovely mixture of homespun wisdom.
But there's this evolutionary biology rationale for people sticking to their own food, which is implicit here, Chris.
Am I wrong in thinking that the rationale is… You're nodding your head.
It is evolutionary.
And the thing which people will… Reference to support this is lactose tolerance, right?
That in various populations where farming of cows and other such creatures was around that people consumed milk and those populations are tolerant to lactose into adulthood, whereas other populations where that wasn't so prevalent have lactose intolerance.
They can consume milk, but if they take too much, it can have bad consequences, right?
And this is true.
If you take a generous reading, you can say, well, they're just pointing out that there might be adaptations or there may be evolutionary consequences to the types of foods that people have eaten for generations that aren't immediately apparent.
But it's actually difficult to come up with other strong examples of this, like the one that everybody mentions.
It's lactose tolerance.
And that's the only one that I hear 99% of people mention.
And also, they give the example of Italian food, but modern Italian cuisine is not exactly something that has been around for 10,000 years.
Let's get straight into the uncharitable version because the strong implication here is that, and this is the theme of the book, so I don't think we're mind reading here, but the idea is that if a tradition has been around for a long time,
then it exists for a reason.
And that reason is basically a culture zeroing in on biological.
Benefits.
Evolutionary benefits to ourselves.
According to their reasoning, because Japanese people, for instance, like raw fish and rice, and Italian people maybe don't.
Actually, that's a bad example.
They're Americans.
Americans also like sushi now.
Australians, then, traditionally haven't eaten a great deal of either.
And that's for a reason, because there's biological differences between Japanese people and Australians.
You're adapted to shrimps.
And barbecues.
And beer.
Well, in the same way, I responded on Twitter by saying that this seems like, you know, Finley Veal hate speech directed at the Irish, because the implication is that we are...
Adapted to cuisines focused around potatoes and root vegetables.
I'm not disparaging Irish cuisine entirely.
There's enjoyable components there and fine British cuisine, but it does feel like telling Italians that they should focus on Italian food and Japanese, these two culinary...
Traditions which are widely recognized as amongst the best in the world.
Yeah.
What about Irish people?
Stick to your Irish durian potato pie.
Literal violence.
That's right.
I mean, I was triggered by this too, because traditional Australian food that doesn't involve a preparation from somewhere else, it's not good, Chris.
Are you sure?
It's not good, man.
To understand Australian traditional food such that it exists is take English food and then just make it so much worse.
Can you do that?
Because that's what made it out to the colonies.
Salted pepper would be the most interesting flavors that you would come across.
I think it's part of advice for cosmopolitan-ness.
Although, you know, you can explore your culinary traditions, fine, do that.
But like their version has too much of a strange, hyper-adaptionist evolutionary tinge to, and a moralistic one as well.
Yeah.
But look, where it's just wrong in scientific terms is just the amazing hyper-adaptionist view that everything that has ever happened, happens for this.
If it sticks around, this is the thing.
I'm not going to get into it too much, but the one thing that did occur to me was that this was randomly dunked on, and rightly so.
But one thing I did notice is that if you compare that to some of the other sorts of stuff that gets dunked on, like some of the more silly takes on food appropriation.
That people shouldn't cook or eat food from other cultures.
The argument is that they can eat it, but they should only eat it when it's prepared for somebody from that an authentic thing, right?
There's a whole spectrum of stuff, right?
Just talking about the sillier versions of it, which get dunked upon as well.
Yeah, one thing I've noticed is that the Venn diagram of people ducking on the Weinstein's book excerpt and the set of people ducking on the food appropriation stuff is completely not overlapping, Chris.
There's a very slim overlap in that.
And it does seem a neat parallel because, as Kevin Bird's tweet said, Brett and Heller say, "No race mixing but for your food."
But that could… Equally be appended to some of the more woke takes on the horrors of people appropriating traditions, other food traditions.
Well, there you go, Chris.
This is peak centrism, our take on this.
There you go, folks.
You can have your milquetoad centrism served at 24 degrees or 26 degrees, but you get both kinds here.
It's great.
Yeah.
I can say I wish there was a little bit more equal opportunity.
Dunking as opposed to ideology-based dunks.
But there is also the fact that I understand when people extend charity to people that they consider to be on the whole doing things which are less harmful than other people.
And you could take the cartoon version and say, oh, maybe the neo-Nazi who's saying you shouldn't eat food outside your culture.
It isn't exactly morally the same as somebody saying you shouldn't appropriate the food from another culture and rely on your, you know, privilege to gain benefit that people from that culture can't have.
There's different motivations underlying that may seem important to whether you would dunk or not.
But just broadly speaking, it would be nice to see some more consistency on the online sphere.
Can we say?
Hmm.
Agreed.
Agreed.
Well, isn't that the perfect pivot to our crass commercialization segment?
We've just talked about the beauty of peak centrism and we need to alert our audience that this episode is the first one where we're going to feature an advertisement and it is for a product which in certain size could be seen as what kind of A milquetoast centrist pro-product.
And we all know that famous example, Matt, is some people advocate for genocide.
Some people say it's bad.
And the appropriate compromise is, you know, somewhere in the middle.
A little bit of genocide, that's fine, right?
That shows the beauty of adopting a perfectly balanced centrist perspective.
Or not, as the case may be.
The golden mean.
The golden mean.
Yeah, the golden this.
So there are some issues with always seeking out a middle ground in opinions.
But that's not what we do.
And that's not what the thing which we're going to advertise does.
Is it, Matt?
No, these penis enhancement pills will have no effect in that regard.
They'll satisfy conservatives, liberals, IDWs.
Your penis will grow to huge levels, never-before-seen levels.
Tremendous, tremendous levels.
We've solved it a little bit, but it'll be alright.
But not with penis pills.
That was a joke.
We're not yet.
We'll get there.
This whole thing is just a ruse to attract various enhancement pills and supplements, but we haven't got the offers yet.
We'll see what kind of package they put together for us, Chris.
Yes.
Wink.
Wink, wink.
So before that, Matt, we need to highlight how good we are and why people would want to work with us as advertising partners.
So why don't we mention what we're actually going to promote?
And we'll add some jaunty music here to illustrate that this is an advertisement.
Jaunty music.
So sorry, are we doing...
Yeah, the ad reads happening now, is it?
That's it, Matt.
Yeah, good night.
Okay, all right.
And I'm...
Yeah, okay, I'm...
You know, it's professionalism.
You pay for what you get.
No one's going to hear this except for our editor.
So there's this app called Ground News, which allows you to compare how stories are being covered across the political spectrum.
So I gave it a bit of a go.
And yeah, it was kind of interesting.
You can search for a thing.
You can see a particular story that you might...
I've stumbled across.
You can see whether it's being covered across the entire political spectrum from relatively mainstream or nonpartisan outlets in the middle.
Not that they're better or anything, Chris, but there's also the right-wing ecosystem, the left-wing ecosystem.
And I tried it out.
And yeah, you can see that there are, you know, stories are really quite different.
So you can get a sense of, you know, what people of different political leanings, what their infosphere actually is.
Who would have thought it, Matt?
The right and the left, a couple of stories differently.
This is keen insight that you're provided here.
Well, it's more that you said that they don't cover the story at all.
Yeah, like some story about Joe Biden appearing senile or something like that.
Maybe, not surprisingly, it'll only exist.
You're blowing my mind here.
You're blowing my mind that you would see that kind of thing of right-wing media.
But I do like the news comparison feature.
Because, you know, it's useful.
Whether or not the stories are good or not, just to be able to compare what's kind of trending within different ecosystems or how things are being covered, I think that's a good thing.
And so there's an app and there's a website called Brown News that lets you identify the bias of media outlets and see how they're framing issues compared to other news organizations.
That seems in line with the kind of thing we...
I generally think it's worthwhile doing, right?
We listen to some content that we don't like on occasion and yeah.
Yeah, that's good.
So ground.news is the website and I'm sure you can search for Ground News and download the app too.
Cheers!
But what you should do if you're doing that is use our particular link, ground.news /gurus, because then people know that they heard this and that's where they come from.
And then you're able to see every side of every news story and make us incredibly attractive to advertisers worldwide.
Good.
The important things.
After that crass commercialization, we're going to turn to an interview with Stuart Ritchie talking about how market incentives and so on are affecting good science and reason in the discourse sphere.
Right?
Right.
Yes, we will.
So Matt and Chris in the past, take it away.
*Bell rings*
Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus.
I'm Matt Brown and with me as always is Chris Kavanagh.
But today we have someone with us to help us figure out what is true, beautiful and real in this crazy mixed up world.
And that person is Stuart J. Ritchie.
Now, Stuart is a Scottish psychologist.
He works at King's College London and he's also an author, has written a book on intelligence and most recently has written a book called "Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth".
So obviously this is something we like to talk about.
Welcome Stuart.
Hi, thanks for having me on.
And I can personally attest having Written an exhaustive Twitter for each chapter of Stuart's book that it's very good in line with the podcast.
I only have a list, Stuart, of 20 complaints that I'm not going to read out.
That's the spirit of the book.
But thank you.
That's very kind.
Yeah, very, very good.
I do remember that back when that was happening, that there was a...
Clear contrast because I had gotten an advanced copy sent to me of James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose's book, Cynical Theories.
And their response to me saying, oh, I'll do a tweet thread about it was to insinuate that I might face legal action were I to do that.
And then your book came.
It's fair to say it was probably going to be a more positive review, but your reaction was only to send me private legal threats.
So I appreciated that.
Yeah, any publicity is a good publicity.
I remember them insinuating that they would sue you if you tweeted about their book.
I think they said that you're welcome to make us even more famous if you violate copyright or whatever.
A strange way for authors to deal with readers of the book, but fair enough.
Yeah, that was also before the turn.
But with James Lindsay, that's not what we're here for.
So, Matt.
One of the things we are here for is to talk about Brett and Heather, actually, because they've written a new book.
Stuart, what's this book called?
Got it right here.
It's by Heather Haring and Brett Weinstein.
It's called A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life.
It's just coming out this month.
I don't know exactly when this podcast is coming out, but it's coming out on, I think, the 16th of September.
I see it here.
I've got a little publicity thing.
It's got nice reviews from...
Jonathan Haidt says it's good, and Robert Sapolsky says it.
Brett and Heather are good.
Famous people have said nice things about it.
There's a nice cover.
Yeah, it's got a little sort of caveman holding a briefcase.
And the whole point of the book is about how we're unsuited to the modern world and all the kind of health and psychological and societal problems that that causes.
Anyway, the reason that I'm bringing this up is I was asked to write a review of it for The Guardian, which is either, by the time this podcast comes out, it's either online or about to be online.
I thought it was rubbish.
I thought it was a rubbish book.
It's a crap book.
What?
Oh my god, this is very disappointing.
I'm sort of vaguely familiar.
I'm not as familiar as you guys are.
What?
We don't know these people that well.
We've covered them once or twice, but you know.
I'm not as obsessed with them, although I have sort of become slightly obsessed with them since reading the book and looking at their podcasts and so on.
And yeah, what an amazingly annoying pair of people they are.
And that's one of the things that's in the review is that they come across as really annoying in the book and on the podcast that they do as well.
Perhaps before we talk about the book, it's interesting to talk about why this book seems like it probably will actually be very successful.
Because it's a very appealing concept, isn't it?
A hunter-gatherer's guide to the 21st century.
It's tapping into evolutionary psychology, which I like, and I think you guys generally like too, even though there is a fair bit of nonsense you can find as well.
It taps into a very appealing theme, which is that we're these evolved organisms that are navigating this very artificial modern world.
And in some ways we've constructed it to suit us very well.
And obviously in other ways, there are things like highly processed sugar and cocaine or whatever, that are lots of fun, but aren't very good for us.
It's an appealing premise, isn't it?
Yeah, absolutely.
And there are some fair points in it.
They talk about things like staying up all night looking at blue light and so on.
And I'm not quite sure if there's good evidence for that.
But the point is that they talk about the weird, novel things that are in our environment.
And you can see why people would find that an appealing sort of premise that the reason you can't sleep is you're involved in a very different place and a different set of circumstances.
And that's why the modern world doesn't quite work for you.
You can see how that would work.
And the reason that you're...
A bit unhealthy and a bit overweight is because, as you say, highly processed sugars and so on.
It's an appealing premise.
The problem is that they have very low standards when it comes to evidence for basically everything that they talk about.
I don't have any issues with the basic rationale of evolutionary psychology, but the problem that has occurred again and again in all the controversies over the years about evolutionary psychology is the low standard of evidence that something is an adaptation or that something is related to, I don't know, the ovulatory cycle you were talking about.
Gad Saad, talking about that in one of your previous podcasts, and the very, very small study that he had produced to back that up.
And there are problems like that in this book as well, and it's linking of evolution to the modern world.
There's a whole literature around this kind of topic.
You could go back to Darwin.
I'm sure they would like to.
Also, Desmond Morris, The Naked Ape, and similar books, which often do have good insights into them, though, like you say.
There's also the issue of speculative theorizing, which always plagues them.
But in particular, you mentioned some of the things that we've noticed.
And one of them was the kind of hyper-adaptionism, which seems to suffuse Brett and Heller's worldview, where if something exists now, it's almost like it has to have an adaptive purpose.
You also see some echoes of that in some of Jordan Peterson's stuff, but I wonder if you can make it clear for people why there might be an issue with that?
What's wrong with seeing things that survive as likely being adaptations?
Yeah, I'm not an evolutionary biologist, but like many undergraduates, I did spend a lot of time reading Richard Dawkins, A Selfish Gene, and Richard Dawkins arguing with Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewington, and people like that, about adaptation and about what adaptation means,
and a kind of a...
I guess you would say philosophy of biology conversation about what it means for something to be an adaptation, what it means for something to be evolved.
From that, I learned that this is a major debate in evolutionary biology.
You can't just look at some feature of an organism and say, this evolved because there are all these other ways that things could have evolved.
There are mechanisms like genetic drift.
There are features like what Stephen Jay Gould would call spandrels, which are things which are necessary parts of...
The evolution of other features, which look like they might be features themselves, but are in fact not.
And the analogy is to these little parts on the side of archways inside churches, and they've got little bits painted in them.
And you might think that was made for that little seam to be painted in.
But in fact, it's a necessary part of the overall archway.
And it came about by accident.
Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewinson wrote this essay saying, there are some aspects of things that you think might be evolved that are actually for accidents.
They're actually spandrels.
And Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett.
Steven Pinker, people like that argue against it and say, well, actually, there are different ways of interpreting this philosophically.
And there's a whole back and forth debate.
And I probably would lean more to the Daniel Dennett side of it.
But that doesn't mean you just can't have the debate at all.
And it doesn't mean you can just assume that everything is an adaptation.
But Brett Weinstein thinks that he has solved this problem.
He thinks that he has come along and just totally fixed this issue with what he calls, I think it's a three-step test.
Of adaptation, right?
And so if a feature of an animal is complex, and he very glibly glosses over what that might mean, but something that has to be complex, you'd think there might be an interesting philosophical discussion about what complex actually means in this case.
But if something is complex and costly, that is, if there's an energetic cost or some kind of material cost to building it or maintaining it, and if it's been around for a very long time, then it can be assumed to be an adaptation.
Now, lots of people would say there are lots of things which organisms do.
Which they might have got into by accident, not through adaptation.
There are lots of things which cultures do, because by the way, he applies this same test to cultural things too.
There are lots of things which cultures do, which are potentially a bit self-destructive and potentially didn't come about because they advanced that culture or make it fitter in the kind of evolutionary sense.
But he just completely ignores all that and says, well, these things are adaptations.
And so therefore, pretty much anything, any feature can be described as an adaptation on his scheme.
And that's what they do in the book.
They talk about essentially everything as an adaptation.
And they go even further and they talk about something which I didn't have space to talk about in my review, called the Omega Principle.
Have you ever encountered this in your listening to Brits and her stuff?
No.
No.
The Omega Principle is about how you apply evolutionary reasoning to culture.
And they talk about epigenetic regulators such as culture.
Now, of course, in biology, epigenetics means things like...
The methylation of the genome and actual biological aspects that regulate the switching on and off of genes and so on.
But they say our definition of epigenetic is different from that.
We want to talk about something different.
So they say culture is epigenetic because it's above the genome.
And I suppose in some sense you could say that, but it's needlessly confusing anyway.
And they say from the Omega principle, we derive a powerful concept.
Any expensive and long lasting cultural trait, such as traditions passed down within a lineage for thousands of years, should be presumed to be adaptive.
Which I think is, as I've just mentioned, a ridiculous thing.
But the funniest thing to me is, and Chris, you're a cultural anthropologist, there'll be many things, which I'm sure you can think of, that cultures do, which are not necessarily adaptive, even though they're expensive and long-lasting.
But the funniest thing about it, in my view, is that the reason it's called the Omega Principle is that, and here's the quote, we have chosen to use the signifier Omega to call to mind Pi, like the other Greek letter, and thus indicate the obligate nature of the relationship.
Adaptive elements of culture are no more independent of genes than the diameter of a circle is independent of that circle's circumference.
So they called it the Omega Principle because it's a Greek letter and that will remind people of a different Greek letter that makes them think of a circle that makes them think of something being related to something else.
Wow!
It's mind-tangling.
As if Greek letters are not used anywhere else in science or no one ever associates Greek letters with anything else.
Of course, we now all associate them with coronavirus variants.
They're just slightly off.
Their reasoning and their way of thinking askew a bit.
Anyone who's read the evolutionary literature, evolutionary biology literature, wouldn't think that way about evolution.
And anyone who's taught students and stuff or used science in any real way wouldn't think that way about Greek letters.
It's just a weird way of thinking about stuff.
And it comes across a few times in the book.
I just think they're just a bit off.
They just don't really think in the same way that perhaps you or I do.
A couple of things that come to mind from that.
One thing, Stuart, which is hugely important to correct is cognitive anthropologists.
The cultural anthropologists are unfavorably predisposed to me.
So, you know, we fought the culture wars for a reason.
I apologize profusely.
Cognitive anthropologists, my apologies.
That's all right.
I'll accept that.
But your point about cultural practices that are long-lasting and must in some way be beneficial, like what?
Like bloodletting?
For example, or trephanine?
Well, exactly.
There's all these things which they're passed down from generation to generation and so on.
Yeah, all the stuff that we had before the advent of modern medicine.
It seems like there's all this literature which is sort of related to the stuff they're talking about.
And I mean, using the Greek letters just suggests they don't know about statistics because that would get horrifically confusing for students.
I can imagine their response to that if you brought up bloodletting or something, because I know that they invoke things that kind of shadow the work of Joe Henrik and co, who tried to argue that cultural taboos can actually encode adaptive information,
which isn't obvious at the surface level, because there's some prohibition about women eating a specific kind of fish, and it turns out that can build up mercury or whatever it is and have an effect.
Even those examples are a challenge, but...
I feel like it's almost hard in some respect because they're clothing close to legitimate areas of science and they're occasionally touching on it and referencing it, but they just take it into this realm of their own bespoke versions,
which are much more speculative and much less firmly grounded in empirical evidence.
That's a feeling I get.
At the very least, you have to do the research.
You have to actually go out there and check.
It's a hypothesis and you have to go out and check.
You can't just assume.
And what they're very much pushing the reader to do is just assume that all cultural traits have come about for a reason and all evolutionary biological traits have come about for a reason.
They're asking you not to do the work.
And I feel like by just gliding over that whole aspect of evolutionary biology...
I say this in the review, that they're doing the reader a disservice.
They're saying, you know, don't worry about all that endless literature on adaptationism and what it means.
Just listen to us.
It's adaptive, right?
These things are all adaptations.
And so now we can carry on with the rest of the book.
It seems like a perfect example of what's wrong with evolutionary psychology or pop evolutionary psychology, which is drawing those direct causal...
Connections in every case between, oh, you see this behavior, you see this feature, what's it for?
It must be for something tremendously important.
And I teach neurophysiology, so it's totally biological, right?
It's all about those little squishy parts of the brain, how they're all interconnected and what they do.
It's obviously based on evolutionary biology in a sense, but at the same time, one of the things that comes home to you is that an awful lot about evolution is contingent, that there isn't any capacity to redesign things.
On a new model, of course, it has to grow like a city or something like that in an organic sense.
And that means that there are lots and lots of suboptimal design choices that have to be made because of that process.
The other thing I wanted to pick up is that the implication of their reasoning is that If it's natural, it's good.
And if it's been around for a long time, from a cultural level, it is therefore also good.
So this sort of connects to your point about this sort of 18th century Burkean conservatism.
Say a bit more about that.
Yeah, I mentioned this in the review.
So the central metaphor of the Chesterton's fence thing, you come across a fence and you think, I want to get rid of this fence.
Why is this fence here?
Let's remove this fence.
But then it turns out that the fence was actually doing something useful and you've made a terrible mistake by removing it.
And so you should always ask why something is there before you remove it and before you destroy it and change it and so on.
And kind of general like conservative point that you might want to make.
And it's a fairly good point in some circumstances.
You don't want to just make changes to systems because they might have evolved or developed in ways which you haven't quite grasped, but there might be a reason for it.
And the way that they apply that is they say there's a reason for all the stuff that we do culturally and there's also a reason for the way that we are biologically and that's evolution and cultural evolution and so we shouldn't mess around with it and by messing around with it they're talking about things in the modern world like having a blue light on your iPhone but also having casual sex and all sorts of things like that including they have these sections at the end of each chapter with a kind of a bullet point list of things which you should and shouldn't do in a sort of a self-help kind of way and some of them aren't fleshed out at all some of them are really Weird and bizarre and not mentioned in the preceding
chapter.
At one point they say you shouldn't have the market involved in humour or music.
And you go, what?
We shouldn't pay to see a comedy gig or something?
Or buy an album, a record?
It's just a very strange thing and there's no explanation for it.
But the point is, what they're trying to say is humour and music are there for some kind of evolution reason and we shouldn't mess around with it.
In the modern world with market forces or something.
I actually don't know what they're trying to say there, but it's all part of this thing about things are the way they are for a reason and you shouldn't mess around with them.
And that's the philosophy of Edmund Burke, right?
It's the kind of idea of we have all these societal systems and so smashing the system is a very bad idea because it might mean that you end up with unforeseen consequences and so on.
Which, as I say, can be a very good point in some cases.
I don't want to have a massive...
Revolution and cause terrible pain and suffering and so on, like many revolutions have, rather than incrementally changing the system in some ways.
I talk about this in my book about changing the way we do science.
I think it needs to be changed dramatically, but I don't want to just smash the current system and replace it with something else because we don't know whether that something else might have.
Bad consequences as well and things which we haven't thought about yet.
But they're just taking that and saying evolution basically supports this.
And that's the central premise of the book.
But in many cases, they don't give a good rationale for why these things are there in the first place.
And they don't give a good kind of evolutionary rationale or even a cultural rationale.
And also they don't provide very good evidence for why they're bad in the modern world.
So I talk about, they mention fluoridation of the water to stop dental cavities.
They say that's having neurotoxic effects on kids.
This would be another thing, right?
We didn't have fluoride in the water.
When we evolved, now we have it.
It's a bad idea to have it.
There's unforeseen consequences.
It causes neurodevelopmental problems in kids.
But if you look at the study they reference, it's like a tiny pilot study that they reference.
They don't provide any more evidence for that in their reference section.
So they're throwing these kind of like quite scary claims out there.
And I've looked a little bit into the...
Fluoride literature in the past and it's full of a lot of fear mongering stuff, but it's not very good.
The research that purportedly shows that water fluoridation lowers the IQ of kids and water fluoridation when you're pregnant will lower the IQ of the baby that's in your womb and so on.
It's very low quality research and there's no discussion of that.
And obviously we can get into this, but this is the same kind of thinking that they get into when they talk about.
Ivermectin and they talk about vaccines and so on.
It's just very naive scientific thinking where they say there is a study, therefore it must be true.
Just tell me, Stuart, did they mention sunscreen at all in the book?
It comes up in passing very, very briefly.
They don't make a big deal of it, but the impression you get is that sunscreen is bad, yeah.
That was something I've talked about before.
Sunscreen isn't necessary.
This is especially triggering for me, an Australian, with high skin cancer rates in the world.
I mean, look at my skin, for God's sake.
But apparently, yeah, sunscreen's a bad idea.
Shouldn't put sunscreen on kids.
All they need to do is take five or ten minutes, time out every hour or so, you know, give your skin a bit of a rest.
It'll be good to go again.
It's exactly the same reasoning.
We didn't have sunscreen in the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness, and so therefore we don't need it now.
But the thing is, you can apply that to anything, and they actually do.
And I think this book was written before they got into all the anti-vaccine stuff.
They mention vaccines in the book and they don't mention them in an entirely positive light.
They say there are bad effects of vaccines and so on.
And of course there are, right?
And there have been cases in the past where vaccines have caused side effects and so on.
They do very much pick almost every aspect of the modern world and focus on the negative aspects rather than saying: Actually, vaccines are this incredible invention that has saved untold lives.
Genetically modified food is another one they talk about in a little bit more detail.
GMOs are potentially good, but you should avoid them if you can.
Sometimes they can be good, but you shouldn't eat genetically modified food, which is a point that...
It's a wrong point, though.
Absolutely.
But it's a point that other gurus that you've talked about have made.
Nassim Taleb, he's a very anti-GMO as well.
For this same reason that, oh, there might be a small chance of a really big risk and they might cause terrible problems and so on.
No evidence of that.
And of course, again, untold millions of people have been saved by the Green Revolution and all that sort of stuff, which was genetically modified food.
And they don't talk about that.
It's very much the negatives and none of the upside.
I just want to mention really briefly that like another correspondence with Nassim Taleb is that kind of...
Because he's a conservative and I think in that Burkean mould of that sort of belief that organic traditional systems that have grown naturally are just inherently more robust.
To whatever black swan events or whatever than these sort of top-down, highly structured, bureaucratic-type systems.
So it's not a criticism.
Like you, I don't agree or disagree with that sort of position.
Incrementalism is a good idea.
It's good to be careful and conservative, making changes, etc.
I'm just pointing out an interesting correspondence there in that it can serve as a pretty useful philosophical substrate for the naturalistic conservatism.
Yes, yeah.
No, it totally can.
And the problem is that it slips into being a naturalistic fallacy.
You have to judge each case on its merits as to whether it's bad or good.
And there is actually a literature on a lot of these things like vaccines and GMOs and so on, which it would be nice for them to refer to occasionally.
But instead you get cherry-picked one or two small studies saying that these things are bad and no real Serious engagement with the scientific literature.
They take the principle of natural things are good and things that have been around for a long time are good and changing them is bad and just apply it in every case.
There are some cases where that probably is true and some cases where it isn't.
But to have it as a general heuristic seems like a really bad idea.
Like Matt says, it's a kind of common thing that we have found amongst a bunch of gurus.
There's a kind of fetishization of tradition.
And there's a valid point about, as both of you have highlighted, that carrying systems down, you have to consider what you're going to replace them by and so on.
But there is also the point that what's preserved in systems is often less than ideal.
And there's been plenty of things that have been preserved over long swathes of history, most of human history, which we...
Wouldn't want to preserve, including like the subjugation of women and so on, right?
Like that's evolutionarily natural if you take the perspective because of sexual dimorphism and that.
But in any case, the one thing I have to ask you, and I promise we'll talk to you about more than this book.
So Brett has his own theories concerning evolution.
They're not entirely well fleshed out anywhere, but Matt and I have listened to him discuss what he refers to as Lineage selection in all our places he's discussed, explorer modes.
And the sense that we've gotten, and other people have gotten, including people like Jerry Coyne, who are better qualified to comment on that, is that he presupposes a very teleological force behind evolution.
And he wants to seek out niches.
And whenever a species becomes too stagnant, there's kind of like this force that will compel it forward.
He referenced in some of the talks that we listened to with Jordan Peterson, this theory about, you know, it's the same thing he discussed with Dawkins about the Germans, the Nazis in World War II being a lineage and the Jews being a lineage, and that this is all best understood as lineage competition.
And my question is, does the book feature much more exposition about lineage selection, lineage competition, or is that there at all?
No, that's not really what the book is saying.
They get the evolutionary stuff, the theoretical evolutionary biology stuff out the way near the start.
They go through the Omega principle and all that stuff.
And then the rest of the book is just how that applies to lots of different aspects of your life.
It talks about...
Educating your kids.
It talks about sex and gender, where they get a bit of the culture war stuff in there about hormones for kids and all that sort of stuff.
They just briefly mention it without really going into any detail.
They make reference to the fact that they've got theories about stuff.
Like for instance, they say, we know that homosexuality is an adaptation and we're going to tease why we think that.
And then they briefly mention it in one sentence and then they kind of move on.
And you go, just a second, you've written a whole book.
Can you not just give one paragraph as to what your theory is or any link to anything?
I get this kind of The impression, and I get this impression from their podcast as well, that they have this kind of smirking, like, we know best.
We've worked all this out.
We've got our theories and we're pretty solid on this stuff.
And we know better than most evolution biologists.
And again, it's just this slightly off view of things.
You've talked about the way they think about evolution is just not really a way that people think about biology.
And it's just not really a way that people think about evolution anymore.
Maybe they...
People have thought about it that way in the past.
I've actually, the only time I've ever corresponded with Brett, I've never corresponded with Heather, was when he said on a Sam Harris podcast, I think it was, that, I can't remember the exact quote, so I'm not going to give the exact quote, but something along the lines of, we're all born entirely with equal capacities for everything, like the blank slate view.
He gave the blank slate view pretty much exactly.
And I sent a tweet saying, What on earth?
Isn't this a bit weird?
And wouldn't no one have picked him up on the fact that he is meant to be a biologist but believes in the black slate.
And then he came back and gave a very weird explanation, again, slightly askew description of what heritability means.
He found it very hard to explain what he meant.
And I think he generally just has this off, this just view that's just off.
And that can be very helpful in some cases because you can look at a field from an entirely different perspective and see lots of, you can be like this genius that shakes up a field because you can see lots of the field's problems and so on.
And I think that's how he thinks of himself.
But unfortunately, it really just means that he ends up just making mistakes.
I also get an impression of a Dunning-Kruger type thing.
I know the Dunning-Kruger effect has been reassessed recently and so on.
The standard interpretation of the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is that your level of confidence is inversely proportional to your level of expertise.
And I know that empirically that might not be exactly who it is, but the classic example, like the karaoke singer who's belting out, I don't know, that Celine Dion song from Titanic or something, but it's completely off-key and sounds absolutely terrible, but it's really going for it.
And I get that impression when they talk about evolution, that they're just slightly off-key.
They're off-key, but they're really confident.
They think they've sorted it out.
They think they've really fixed this problem.
I've seen it recently.
You highlighted this in your podcast about when they talked about statistics as well, like meta-analysis for the ivermectin stuff.
What he said about meta-analysis, which is that you don't need to worry about the biases of individual studies if you do a meta-analysis, is completely wrong.
It's totally 100% wrong.
But he said it with such confidence and such vehemence that I can only see the Dunning-Kruger type thing, that he just doesn't really know.
So he's very confident about it because he doesn't have the expertise to know.
And I think that's very dangerous, especially when you get into talking about vaccines and so on and treatments for COVID.
And it makes it all the more frustrating and annoying to listen to them talk or read about the stuff in the book because they think that they're taking a very rigorous scientific approach to everything.
It's like a classic sort of pseudoscientific approach.
It's just a tissue of science.
On what really is just a kind of a preconception that they're trying to justify all along.
Just to follow up on that, Stuart, whenever they were recently on Joe Rogan, they were talking about what real science is.
And they were begrudgingly mentioning that, yes, we need numbers and we need to quantify things.
But like fundamentally, science is getting into the field, wrestling a bat.
Like, you know, trying to fiddle with its genitalia to work out what it's up to.
But there's always this division between people who say, you know, like if you're doing studies about chimps in the wild versus chimps in the field, that the researchers have different opinions about the capacity.
So there is legitimate debates there.
But the way they take it is there's a kind of spiritual science that you just get from being like them and going into the jungle.
And it just like seeps into you and then You know, meta-analyses and numbers and all that.
It's just a feeling that you get that ivermectin works no matter what the naysayers say.
Yeah, I completely agree with that.
That's very much the impression you get because they give lots of anecdotes about...
What happened when they went to the jungle and so on.
They're in the rainforest doing all these things and walking across a rickety bridge and all that sort of stuff.
But I think the ivermectin thing and also the vaccine thing fits in very well to this world because the ivermectin, they keep emphasising that ivermectin has been around for 40 years and it's very safe.
And these mRNA vaccines are very novel.
And also the lab leak.
We shouldn't be messing around with stuff that is there for a reason.
It all fits into this worldview.
So I think if you kind of step back, they've explained why they get into all these ridiculous situations.
And they like this, oh, it's just a feeling, just a vibe type thing.
Because that's very much their overall overarching worldview.
And they're just applying it in very predictable ways.
Unfortunately, there's been a pandemic and they've applied it and it really should not apply.
Entirely new things like mRNA vaccines have been near miraculous in dealing with the pandemic.
I've got this running hypothesis that it's a bit like the guy who played the president on the West Wing.
It comes across as more presidential, more authoritative.
Just more convincing as a president than any real president in the history of presidents.
And I feel that they have subconsciously or consciously dedicated themselves to acting the intrepid scientist.
And I feel like they're good at it.
Would you agree?
Yeah, yeah, totally.
I think they are very good at it.
They're both...
And also brother, Eric Weinstein, are all people who have this enviable capacity to be able to just talk about stuff for endless long periods, to be able to pontificate.
I don't know if there's a psychological variable.
I'm interested in this.
There are clearly people in history that have this capacity, some very good and some very bad people in history, who can just speak extemporaneously on any topic for very, very long periods and sound very convincing and sound very authoritative.
Historical figures that clearly do this a lot.
The first one that comes to mind is Hitler.
I don't want to associate that with Hitler.
Your people and my people are famously described as having the gift of the gap, but maybe the differences can speak for long, but not that eloquently.
Yeah, but I think there are individuals who clearly just have this prolix thing where they can just go for long, long, long periods.
And you hear all these stories of them talking.
And that's what I get on these podcasts, these long-form podcasts that they keep talking about, where it's really just one person talking for hours and hours and hours about any given topic.
If you listen to the podcasts on the mRNA vaccine or the ivermectin and all that, if you didn't know about meta-analysis, for instance...
You would find that very convincing, like the things he says sound like scientific propositions and sound like scientific arguments.
The things that Heather Haying says about ivermectin, it works for Zika, it works for dengue, it works for all these other diseases and then you...
That sounds very convincing and she can give this huge long list of all of the reasons that ivermectin is good.
And then you just Google it and you find these are studies in petri dishes.
They're not randomized controlled trials.
The whole thing just crumbles to dust as soon as you pick it up.
But it sounds so convincing.
And you're absolutely right.
It's like playing the part of the SAGE scientists.
I don't mean SAGE as in the British SAGE group.
The lowercase sage who's telling you all this hard-won evolutionary wisdom.
And that is why I think the book will do very well, because it's self-help for people who are a bit pissed off on the modern world, maybe feeling a little bit unsatisfied in their life, and they want to find out a good evolutionary scientific reason for it.
And it's not their fault.
It's that the modern world has brought all these things into their life that they're unsuited to.
And yeah, I think it's going to be a bestseller.
So depressing, Chris.
Yeah, you know.
Far be it from us, Matt, to disparage long-form podcasts about niche topics where people speak endlessly on their pet interests.
But with the hypocrisy aside, I've recently been taking a couple of courses on Coursera related to topics that I'm interested in, auditing them as I drive back and forth.
And they're really good.
They're university-level courses taught by Paul Bloom or taught by some famous politics professor.
And I can't help thinking, you know, I also consume A lot of the long-form podcast type stuff that you're talking about for interest and for masochistic tendencies.
And it's night and day, right?
Because the difference on those courses are, you know, they're at university level standard.
So they're very clear about the standards of evidence and they're not constantly proposing revolutionary theories for things or their own bespoke version.
They're relaying research literature.
And the thing that struck me is...
Those courses, anyone can go on and audit them for free.
You can pay if you want the certificate, but you can go on and audit them.
And lots of people do, especially in the developing world.
They're a good thing, I think, these MOOCs.
But that's not the thing that gets someone super famous.
It's not what pushes someone into the Jordan Peterson level of fame or the Brett and Heller level of fame.
And that requires contrarian takes.
That requires...
Hot takes and to wed things to politics.
It's also where things go wrong.
So you were talking about that and your review highlights the need to give hot takes on issues.
And this probably relates to your broader criticisms, you know, about COVID skepticism and so on.
That there seems to be a gravitational pull that brings people towards, especially now with the pandemic.
COVID.
And you've done a lot of work with this.
I wonder if you have some thoughts about, is it the modern ecosystem?
Is it just because we haven't had a global pandemic in a long time?
Why is it that so many people are drawn to COVID?
Not just ivermectin, lockdown, skepticism, the whole shebang.
Yeah, the funny thing is we've already seen multiple cycles of the same thing happening.
We had hydroxychloroquine last year, lest we forget.
We had a whole cycle of...
People becoming obsessed with that as the next big thing.
And it hasn't actually fully gone away.
There are still people who are pro-hydroxychloroquine.
I saw someone on GB News, which is this new right-leaning news channel in the UK, advocating hydroxychloroquine just a few days ago.
And I thought, my goodness, these things really are very sticky.
I think in these kind of spheres, in these kind of media spheres, there's no really checking or saying we have now completely discarded that hypothesis.
As long as it's anti-consensus or what's seen to be the mainstream at any given time, it gives people that little frisson of excitement when they stand up and say, I'm pro this drug that you think doesn't work, or I'm anti the thing that you think does work, like a lockdown or a vaccine passport.
I think a lot of it is just memes, right?
I think a lot of it is just...
People sense what the position of the mainstream is.
They sense that being outside the mainstream is to believe in ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine or whatever it is.
And then they just repeat things that are associated with that meme.
They just sometimes mindlessly repeat things or have this very strong confirmation bias to seek out evidence that's to do with that particular thing.
And then they just repeat it.
And then unfortunately, the people on the other side start repeating memes pro-lockdown or whatever it is, memes, and they can go off too far along the other direction.
But the issue is you have an audience.
Who is pushing you along on all of these things.
So you have an audience who praises you very strongly when you talk about ivermectin.
And then you want to push a little bit further in that direction because you're getting lots of approval for it.
You're getting lots of kudos from your audience.
And so you see, maybe you say something about vaccines as well, and you get lots of kudos as well from an audience.
You maybe gather more people in who are constantly praising you and so on.
And I think this is probably the situation Brett and Heather get themselves into, that they had this audience that's praising them constantly for saying all these contrarian things.
And who would want to disappoint them?
Who would want to say, actually, I wasn't right about that.
Actually, I was wrong.
All those genius level takes that I thought I had were actually wrong.
We've been misleading you for months and months.
They've gone too far.
They've been pulled really far away from where the actual reality is.
And they could never go back now.
They could never stand up and say, all that stuff we said about ivermectin was completely wrong.
Even as, in the particular case of ivermectin, it's not just that the studies are low quality.
Back in March, I was writing about how the ivermectin studies were low quality.
There was a big review done by, I think, a Canadian health Authority who said all the evidence we've got for hydroxychloroquine is bad quality trials.
So either small trials or they didn't do the blinding or the randomisation correctly or whatever it is.
All the issues that you might have with studies.
But it's even worse now because many of those studies have turned out not just to be low quality but to be fraudulent.
Like several big ivermectin studies are now fraudulent.
If anything would change your view on a scientific hypothesis.
It would be that the evidence base that you thought you were relying on and have referenced many times and told your thousands of followers about was fraudulent.
It was fake.
Someone made it up.
And yet there's nothing that you can say that will change their mind.
Unfortunately, they say making that change, removing that study from our meta-analysis does not change the results.
And they always say that.
Inevitably, that always comes out.
This massive statistical criticism you've made of our study, we've reanalyzed it.
It doesn't change the results.
It's amazing how often that happens.
I really think it's this gravitational pull of being praised by people that really drags people off into different directions.
And I think all you can do is bear in mind that you need to try and piss your audience off as much as you can and say things which will enrage people on either side of any given debate, if they're true, and not just stick to one side.
I think that's one of the big problems.
We've talked about this a fair bit, which is that phenomenon of audience capture.
We're all vulnerable to social approval and attention.
Has a pretty high opinion of oneself and maybe has narcissistic tendencies.
And I think that vulnerability is magnified a hundredfold and arguably these new characteristics of social media and stuff.
It's like the crack cocaine of attention and popular regard.
One of the things that's really astounded me because I've studied vaccine hesitancy for Probably 10 years now.
And before COVID, it didn't really have a strong political alignment.
That's one thing that's different.
It was kind of pretty much diffuse.
And to the extent that it was associated with particular subcultures, it was actually in places like Australia and some places like on the coastal United States, more associated with kind of High socioeconomic, liberal, people who are interested in maximizing their health and wellness and things like that.
Big associations with complementary and alternative medicine, which obviously has these roots in counterculture, sixties kind of crystals and so on.
The sort of sociology of it was very different from what we see now.
And it's interesting because it parallels the shift in the sort of tectonic shifts in political.
Things where right-wing parties have become much more populist and this sort of weird Silicon Valley, nootropics, self-optimization thing has weirdly shifted.
I think we understand why vaccines are inherently unappealing.
It's just not an appealing concept to have an injection of anything and it's not an appealing concept to have an injection of the toned-down version of a virus.
Whereas things like complementary medicine, pretty much like our gurus, services and treatments that are just not designed to work, but designed to be appealing.
That's sort of how I square that circle.
They think it works.
Well, just, yeah.
One thing that that makes me think about, Matt, and Stuart, I think you will have seen these connections as well, is I know that you were, I think at least I might be maligning you here, but were active in skeptics circles,
you know, Back 10 years ago, or that kind of thing, when it used to be mainly about alternative medicine and creationism.
And I know your website, for example, is reminiscent of Talk Origins, the creationist checklist.
But one thing that I've noticed, and it would be good to get your thoughts on, is that the old skeptic movement and those kind of topics, like Matt said, they touched on politics.
There was right-wing politicians pushing global warming or evolution denial or whatever.
It was really secondary.
And the bigger thing was the pseudoscience and the alternative medicine sphere and that kind of thing.
And it struck me as well that they used to listen to Skeptics Guide to the Universe.
I still do.
Still like it.
But it feels like because they've ruled out addressing politics, they don't want to focus on politics and traditional skepticism tries to avoid that arena, that they're now missing out on a...
A huge part where pseudoscience and alternative theories and so on come to.
So I'm just curious, especially with your website, because that's bound to have been taken politically by some people, what your thoughts are about that shift?
Yeah, so the website is covidfaq.co.
As you say, it's reminiscent of the old websites where people used to put up creationist claims and like, you know, there are no transitional fossils or whatever.
And then you would get various references that said, Well, actually, there are.
Archaeopteryx is a transitional fossil and whatever.
And you would find ways to respond to the common tropes, the common arguments that you hear in these kind of debates.
And there's also one for global warming skeptics called Skeptical Science, I think, where it responds to things like the world stopped heating up in 1998.
All the kind of classic arguments that you hear in global warming skeptic circles.
And so we made this for that reason.
But someone made a very insightful point just the other day on Twitter.
And I think it was either an anonymous account or someone who I didn't follow in it.
I can't recall who it was, so apologies.
Might be you, Matt.
Could have been you.
You're anonymous.
Thoughtful.
Thoughtful.
Probably me.
Nobody knows who you are.
Let's just assume it was Matt.
Yeah.
And I'll just paraphrase.
What they said was, and it kind of made me sit back and go, God, that is so good.
They're so right.
The skeptics movement was very much training you to refute arguments that you'd already decided were wrong or position that you already decided were wrong.
So, like, there were categories of people who...
We all agree are wrong.
And then the skeptics movement went out and criticized them.
So creationists, those people are wrong.
Evolution is true.
We know that.
And so what you get in the skeptics movement is learning about fossils and learning about DNA and whatever else would help you, you know, defeat a creationist and geological stuff and whatever.
Anything that would help you defeat a creationist in an argument.
Homeopaths are wrong.
Let's learn about molecular concentrations of stuff and so on and learn about that.
And so when it comes to something new, like a political realignment.
Or new kinds of arguments, which there isn't really a clear side of, and this is where the culture war stuff can come in.
The skeptics movement don't really know what to do, and they fall to bits.
And you're seeing when the skeptics movement became less of a thing was when it split up along political lines.
It split up along the kind of social justice side and the intellectual dark web side, I guess you could kind of say, is the way that the two sides of the skeptics movement sort of went.
Because there wasn't really a clear skeptics position on that stuff.
And as you say, I think that's a really important weakness in it is that they didn't have a kind of adaptability to new kinds of arguments.
They just had a set of people that they disagreed with and then they disagreed in detail with them.
And I think that's a useful service and it's a very useful sort of almost like a consumer protection type service where you're saying, by the way, this stuff doesn't work.
This snake oil thing doesn't work.
And here's why.
And I think that's really important.
But when it comes to new issues like some of the ones that we've seen in COVID.
It just falls to bits.
It's really, really difficult.
Compared to what we all thought we were doing in the skeptics movement, which was rigorously applying critical thought to every single thing, that's not really what we were doing.
It fits with my kind of general feeling these days that everything's just memes and people repeating things that are socially acceptable, like socially acceptable in the skeptics movement to say that homeopathy is bad.
And so you just learn all the things that, you know, and you make homeopathy jokes and whatever else.
And it's just socially, that's just the social thing to do.
And I think You saw this at the very start of the pandemic.
And this is where I was thinking of ways that we could argue about things and things we could disagree on.
And I think possibly in recent podcasts, you've been a bit too kind to the kind of medical establishment or authorities or whatever.
At the start of the pandemic, you had our friend Eric Weinstein coming on and saying, remember at the start of the pandemic when they said masks didn't work and now they say they do.
And you were saying, well, you know, they made a mistake.
Now they've got it right.
And that's what matters.
But if you think back to February...
2020, it was quite an extreme thing to see all of the world's health authorities, all of, certainly in the UK and the US, I'm not quite sure where you are, what the authorities were saying, but you had all the authorities saying in very, very vehement, very certain terms that masks didn't work.
It spread around.
Again, it became a meme.
It became a culturally acceptable thing to say that masks didn't work.
And you had all these people going in extreme, like in capital letters on their Twitter, masks don't work.
My favorite tweet was an epidemiologist who was at a conference saying, "I'm at a conference with 60 epidemiologists.
We're all in a small room.
Not one of them was wearing a mask."
They were saying that in a very much "you should be like us" type thing.
And then it looked very embarrassing because you can read that person's tweet a few months later when they had changed their profile picture to them wearing a mask and so on.
And you had this kind of weird thing that only Twitter can do, which is you see the old tweet with The person's picture and also their display name has like the mask emoji in it five times and all that.
And it really, I find that quite a scary cultural thing because we were told by all the authority figures and not in uncertain terms, not in we think that masks probably don't work, but you saw a campaign.
I don't think necessarily coordinated, but because I think these things just spread through kind of cultural osmosis.
But you saw a campaign of people saying that masks didn't work.
And in fact, Make it worse.
Make COVID worse.
If you wear a mask, you were more likely to get COVID, actually.
Now, they certainly didn't have any evidence for that.
And if you pushed back against them, they would not have been able to provide you with any evidence.
And yet, it was extremely certain, the evidence you got.
And I think that feeds the conspiracy theorists, because later down the line, when they had to make their U-turn, the conspiracy theorists, like the kind of COVID-skeptic, lockdown-skeptic type people, could come out and say, you were very certain in the past.
What makes you so certain now?
My remedy to that is that you say things with uncertainty all the time.
I don't have an answer to how scientists, when they're talking to the general public and talking to policymakers, should express uncertainty.
I think there's probably people doing research into this and there must be good ways of thinking about how we adjust our message.
But clearly the way not to do it is to say things in capital letters as if they are 100% certain like they did with masks.
I also think at the same time as that...
Certainly, again, in the UK, I don't know what the case was with other places.
And of course, Australia, for one thing, locked down very fast, or at least closed down its borders and so on.
But in the UK, at the same time as that, our scientists were planning a herd immunity strategy, right?
We were planning that 60% of the population would catch COVID, that we needed to just let it burn through.
There was no point in trying to stop it from getting into the country, no point in trying to stop it spreading, just let it go.
And only when presented with the really catastrophic estimates of how many people would die when this was calculated.
Did they kind of again do a screeching U-turn and change the way?
So I actually think that a lot of the narratives about expert failure and failure of the authorities and so on are actually quite well borne out by the COVID pandemic.
And certainly the start of the COVID pandemic when things really, these people really screwed up very badly, at least in the UK and in certain other places.
And we're slow to do things like lockdown and slow to do things like attempting to actually stop the virus from getting into the country using things like quarantine and so on.
When I hear Eric Weinstein saying that stuff, I don't want to agree with him because he's Eric Weinstein.
But I do think that he does have a point.
I don't think you should dismiss the fact that our faith in the experts should have been shaken quite a lot.
And that's before you get into it.
What people in my field, psychology, were saying at the start of the pandemic as well, which I've written about extensively as well, which was deeply embarrassing.
But I don't know.
That would be my sort of response to some of the stuff you've been saying recently on the podcast, which is just I think the experts need a bit more criticism.
And just because Eric Weinstein is saying it doesn't mean it's necessarily 100% wrong, even if it might be quite annoying.
Well, so I have a couple of thoughts about it.
This will be good.
So the first thing is points that I think are completely spot on and that we don't really have a disagreement on.
Is that there's a need for humility and an ability to express uncertainty.
I completely agree with that.
Also completely agree that various institutional, including public health bodies, including governments, fucked up massively, repeatedly, sent out conflicting messages in the early months.
They didn't take measures that they were advised to.
And so on.
I'm not saying you, Stuart, in general, but I think that's a misinterpretation of the argument that me and Matt want to make about authorities and experts and that.
It isn't to say that the institutions did it all well and that the authorities' messaging was not confusing or counterproductive.
That I'm on board with.
Where I probably disagree a bit is that what I want to say in regards to masking policy.
Is that, first of all, as you mentioned, in the US and the UK, people like Fauci, he famously had these clips played of him saying, you don't need to wear masks if you're out in the public and so on.
And he's quite unequivocal about it.
At the same time as that was happening in Japan, the medical public health authorities were saying people should wear masks because there was a cultural difference there.
The evidence base isn't different, but there is a difference in terms of How normal that is and how compliant people will be in that.
And even now, in Japan now, I see all around me that people in the UK and US are having these endless debates about wearing masks after they said that we can get vaccinated and should we be doing that?
And like in Japan, there's none of that debate.
People just wear masks.
They wear masks in their car.
Nobody wants to do it, but there's just not this culture of this is infringing on your freedom because that's what people were doing anyway.
When they got a cold, they wore a mask.
What I wanted to argue and why I think Eric and stuff get it wrong is that I looked into the literature back when this debate was happening and was quite surprised to see that the evidence for Cloth masks in community settings was pretty crap.
There's some positive study.
There's some studies that were not great quality.
Guy would characterize it as not massively different than the ivermectin literature.
And the guy who runs State Star Codex did a blog on it.
And he made that point.
He reviewed it and he does these things quite well.
And he said, look, the literature isn't good.
But his second point was, but given the situation, given what we know about the virus.
People should be recommending this, even if the clinical evidence isn't strong.
We don't always have the clinical evidence, and there's good reason.
Physical barriers are obviously going to be helpful.
I agreed with that conclusion.
But my point with the people who were focusing on the public health bodies in the government is that they basically regarded it as because they think that masks work and that they should work, that the clinical evidence...
Necessarily was there to show that.
And that wasn't there.
So because it wasn't there, I could see why a public health body would decide we're worried about shortages, but we're also worried about compliance.
And we have these people who've done reviews of the literature and said it's not very strong about cough masks.
We don't know.
So on the cost-benefit analysis, I think that good fiat people could reach the conclusion we don't need to promote that.
And that's the part that I want to argue, is that you can say that they were wrong and that in some circumstances they may have hid their motivations.
They may have not admitted that it was because they wanted to preserve the N95 masks.
But it is also possible for public health bodies to reach different conclusions when there's a messy literature and they do different cost-benefit analysis.
And it doesn't mean that it was all a conspiracy to lie to the public.
It's more like...
Data can be messy and you can reach different conclusions.
Sure.
I'm not arguing that necessarily that it was a conspiracy to lie to the public.
I don't think it was a conspiracy to lie to the public.
And I actually don't think it was a noble lie either.
I don't think they said we want to preserve mask stocks and therefore we will just tell people that they don't work.
I think they thought they didn't work.
I think a few people decided that was the case.
And then just by pure memes, it spread out to everyone else and everyone else.
It became the thing to say that masks don't work.
Oh, the stupid people wearing masks.
And you would do a tweet about...
I saw someone wearing a mask today.
Haha, what an idiot.
And there were plenty of them.
There was no shortage of that kind of thing.
Articles in the news saying if you're wearing a mask, there might be something a bit wrong with your brain.
You're falling prey to some sort of psychological bias or whatever.
I think they genuinely believed that masks didn't work.
I think that was just wrong.
If the conclusion is there's a terrible conspiracy and our health authorities are treating us like idiots and so on and they're all having a laugh at our expense.
No, I don't think that's the case.
I think it's the cock-up theory, which is I think they just genuinely thought, The UK health authorities at least thought at the start of the pandemic that there was no way that we could stop the virus from spreading around the population, so just let it go.
And they thought masks don't work.
They thought there's not going to be a vaccine for a very long period of time.
They just had all these wrong assumptions.
And you can see from their behaviour that they operated on those assumptions.
That's what they did.
They went out and said, don't wear a mask.
They went out and said, we're going to have to have herd immunity through infection in the population.
They were on the news saying that.
I don't think that was some kind of special...
Galaxy brain type liar.
I think it was just that is what they thought was true and that was wrong.
It would be nice if people just came out and said that they were wrong.
But the problem is that now we've had all these kind of denials and people trying to obfuscate it and then people coming along and saying, well, actually they were just trying to preserve mask supplies and trying to impose a very organized way of thinking onto what was essentially a chaotic period where people were just wrong about all sorts of stuff.
But they were saying, well, the reason that they did all that ridiculous stuff was because they actually thought X, Y, Z thing.
I think they were just chaotically wrong.
And some people got it right.
I think Scott Alexander, as you say it, Slater Codex, got it generally right, which was there's pretty crap evidence right now, i.e.
early 2020.
But theoretically speaking, it seems like given that something could spread through droplets that come out your mouth or nose, having something physical in the way would probably be helpful, even if that's quite hard to demonstrate in a randomized controlled trial and so on.
So it's probably best to wear a mask.
It's a fairly low.
It's not going to cause you a huge amount of hassle in your daily life in most circumstances, probably.
So you might as well just wear one, which is my reasoning right from the start.
So I don't think it's a conspiracy.
I think it's a cock-up.
But the fact that our authorities can cock up and yet seem so vehement and so certain about stuff is scary enough.
Look, you make a lot of good points there, Stuart.
This is one prediction.
It's like going back in hindsight and saying, I was right about this.
At the time, I remember, I couldn't understand why they weren't restricting international travel really quickly.
I do believe that it was just a failure of imagination.
Like it just was not something that not only experts or authorities, but everybody, everybody in the community, just the thought of just shutting down international travel at that time was unimaginable.
And like a month later, it was, well, of course we have to do that.
And in a fast moving emergency and in a crisis, there's going to be heaps of things like that.
I think a good parallel is actually the conduct of something like World War II, which is like most wars, just one cock up.
After the next kind of a rolling disaster, and you stumble through and figure it out.
If you're lucky, you have a good outcome.
Dealing with a pandemic without a generations of experience in actually dealing with one is going to include all of those things.
But I take all your points about the communication of uncertainty and the unwillingness to accept any kind of errors and so on.
I think those are significant things.
But I'm also aware that there's a difference between a scientific consensus.
And managing uncertainty within a scientific community, that's one thing.
And then when you actually have to transfer that to public messaging on policy, it's an entirely different thing.
And I'll give you an example of this.
In Australia, for instance, we had two vaccines available.
We've got Pfizer and we've got AstraZeneca.
We're very slow to get them.
Not enough Pfizer, pretty good supply of AstraZeneca.
There was some...
Evidence of very small risk to people with AstraZeneca.
Long story short, there was confused messaging about the vaccines.
Just a little bit.
One politician was saying this, one politician said something else.
One expert or someone within authority in the health department said this, and there were mixed messages.
It was just really quite small.
But that threw half the population into confusion and suddenly nobody wanted to get the AstraZeneca at all.
And it was a massive, it still is a big problem.
That's just an example of how any kind of deviation from simple I guess what I'm trying to say is that I understand the impulse when it comes to sticking to the line and falling into line when it comes to the public messaging.
And you're not saying it was a conspiracy or anything like that.
And I guess I'm just pushing back on the idea that it betrays some.
Sort of unmitigated disaster or some sort of deep fundamental problem with how things are done.
I see that kind of thing as a somewhat natural consequence of circumstances and the demands that are on public messaging.
Yeah, I totally understand why people do it.
And the Foley and Zaline thing I can completely see because...
There are lots of tried and true health messages that we know are correct.
And one of them is take your vaccine for, I don't know, something like the MMR vaccine or other vaccines that we've been using for a long, long time.
Public health type people have been repeating those messages quite rightly for a long, long time.
So you can see why the impulse is there.
But I think what we've learned in this case is that when a new situation like this arises, we need to be a little bit less willing to fall into line and just repeat the same thing again and again.
Here's another example is handwashing.
In the UK, again, I'm not super familiar with What other places have done?
Although, actually, Chris, you're in Japan and I think Japan have had this right for vastly longer than the UK have.
We emphasised hand washing very strongly right at the start of the pandemic.
And fair enough, back then, people thought that it might spread through touching things, through fomite transmission.
And so washing your hands for 20 seconds.
And you had Boris Johnson saying that you should sing Happy Birthday twice while you're washing your hands so it passes 20 seconds and so on.
And that was a major thing.
And obviously, you walk through any train station and there's hand sanitiser.
And I've done a bit of volunteering at the vaccine centre and they're sanitising everyone's hands.
And there's people wiping down the pens that you use to write your name down.
Because in case there might be some COVID on the pens and the clipboards, you've got to wipe down.
They've got volunteers coming in for the whole day wiping down things with antiviral disinfectant.
And of course, it doesn't work really to help.
To stop COVID, it might be a very tiny minority of cases that are spread through fomite transmission, but it's almost impossible to find cases that are definitively spread through touching things.
It spreads through the air.
It's an airborne virus spread through droplets and airborne particles.
And yet the public messaging was, I think we understood this in probably April, March, April 2020.
We understood that it's in the air and we need to emphasize things like ventilation and so on.
Japan had its three C's thing about...
Avoiding crowded and closed and close contact settings.
And those were all a recognition of the fact that the virus spreads in the air.
Although it did also talk about handwashing, but that was in there as a sort of a minor thing.
But in the UK, the handwashing thing was the first thing on our government's COVID slogan until July 2021.
We had hands face space as the things you should bear in mind for COVID.
They knew for a year or more that handwashing was...
Maybe they didn't know that it was essentially ineffective, but they must have known that it was down the list.
You looked on the NHS website and handwashing, there were like a list of 10 points on how to avoid COVID.
Handwashing was about six of them was related to handwashing.
Put your tissue in the bin after you've used it.
Wash your hands when you come home for work.
Wash your hands.
Wash your hands.
That's another example of how the falling into line thing...
Whether you're doing the government's messaging or whether you're working for the NHS or whether you're working for some kind of university here.
I'm in my office at university and we have a hand sanitizer station outside and so on.
That was all completely a waste of everybody's time.
We should have been much more able to jump off that particular train when the evidence showed that it was not effective.
And so there's this inertia as well as the kind of tendency of people to fall in line.
There's this inertia about changing things when we've got into the way of doing things.
And I'm glad that we managed to change the message on masks, although I think there was, again, needless inertia there because we'd been so certain about how masks definitely didn't work.
We were slow to adapt there, but we were grossly slower to adapt away from the hand-washing message because we'd spent so much time emphasizing it in the first place.
Again, it's a bit like the gurus kind of digging themselves into a position and getting more and more stuck there and kind of an inability to say that you're wrong and try and draw a...
An analogy to another part of the podcast that we've previously discussed.
I think the government got themselves into, in the UK anyway, they got themselves stuck in a rut of this almost like OCD handwashing constantly all the time for no actual reason.
Then comes the post-hoc rationale of, well, even if it's not good for COVID, it's good for other stuff.
So we should include it in the messaging anyway.
Handwashing's helpful for norovirus.
But then, if you're going to put general health messages in the COVID messaging, you might as well tell people to eat less fatty foods and go for a run as well.
Surely the COVID messaging should be about COVID.
What you just said that people should be telling is the thing which a lot of the heterodox people are saying you're not allowed to mention.
You're not allowed to mention that people should be outdoors and be healthy and lose weight and stuff.
But on the hand-washing thing specifically, because I read your article about that at the time, and in good...
Robust IDW sphere thing.
I had some pushback for you on that.
My pushback is not the argument that you make that this is not a massive priority message.
That it was okay at the start that people were concerned that they need to wash hands.
So it's understandable that they might emphasize that.
It's a relatively simple thing to implement for places to put alcohol wipes and whatnot.
And like you said.
It kills a lot of germs with one spray.
Even if it didn't work, it would be a useful thing for people to be disinfecting their hands.
But if the issue is that you've got a limited amount of bandwidth and you want to give two or three messages that are most important for COVID, I was convinced by your argument that what the government should be focusing on are things like ventilation, where they haven't emphasized it and so on.
But the part that I couldn't...
I don't know if I agree with you or don't, but I'm just trying to work it out in my head.
But it's that in Japan, for example, which as a country had an emphasis on ventilation from fairly early stage, it's still universal all over everywhere in Japan that there's hand sanitizers in literally every single shop.
And Japan also didn't do things like shut down pachinko parlors or nightclubs where they were having breakouts.
So even though they had the messaging, it's kind of, you know, an illustration that the policies can be schizophrenic.
But I wonder when, if you want the public to engage in hygienic practices, and if your public health messaging says three or four things, and one of them is avoid frauds, wash your hands.
This is a point that I keep coming back to that if you followed, say the WHO or CDC, which are like two institutions that get regularly.
Heavily criticized because of their mask stance at the beginning.
But while they were disparaging masks, or at least they were saying, we currently do not recommend wearing masks, they were also saying, we do recommend social distancing, not going out in crowds, not meeting other people.
People act as if you followed their advice, you would be putting yourself in huge risk.
But if you're not meeting people outside or inside, and you're definitely not meeting people inside, you don't.
Need to worry so much.
I wear a mask still inside and outside.
In Japan, it's the norm.
But I'm just speaking that in terms of messaging, surely the biggest one is the social distancing, avoiding other people, avoiding crowds, yelling indoor with lots of people stuff.
Sure.
If you could follow that, then that would be the most important thing.
But I think there are a lot of people who, first of all, there are a lot of people who can't follow that.
A lot of people who never worked from home during the pandemic because their job was, they couldn't do that.
And so I think messaging to people that if you've washed your hands, then you've done one of the big things against COVID, when in fact you've done nothing, could even be damaging in that case.
Because I don't want to get into galaxy brain things about, oh, it lulls people into a false sense of security and then they stop doing...
It could.
Like, it could.
But I don't know.
There's not actually that much evidence.
You know, there were all these arguments about seatbelts and things like people will drive more dangerously, all these kind of things.
And I don't know if you want to get into kind of like second order effects, because the first order effect is like, I think these health messages should just have the first order effect.
Do these things work to stop you from getting COVID?
And if it doesn't, then it shouldn't be in the health messaging.
And I think getting into all these complicated arguments about it'll make people safer from other things is, as they say online, you're coping with having made a mistake in the past.
And I think that's how people justify the handwashing stuff now.
I agree that I don't think these organizations were deliberately trying to mislead people, nor do I think that if you followed the general advice, stay at home and avoid people and keep away from crowds and stuff, if you followed that, then you would be a hell of a lot safer.
It's just that these are messages that are being put out to a lot of people.
And there's a lot of interactions happening every single day with those messages in mind.
And if you have the messaging right, then you could save some number of people's lives.
And if you've got the messaging wrong, then you're at best missing an opportunity and at worst misleading people and lulling them into a false sense of security.
And that's before you get into the wasted money, the wasted resources, the wasted time in setting up.
Hand sanitizer stations everywhere and pouring loads of government money into Dettol's coffers and all that sort of stuff to set up hand sanitizing stations absolutely everywhere.
Wiping down the carriages in the New York subway and the London tube and so on with antiviral doing this deep clean and all that sort of stuff.
It became a completely absurd industry of this kind of thing when, you know, there were probably smarter things you could have thought about to do at the same time.
Running more trains, getting people to think about when they use the train at less peak times, just keeping windows open.
I think still people aren't really that aware of the ventilation aspect.
There's some polling in the UK recently that showed that a lot of people think that handwashing is the thing that really matters and that, you know, ventilation stuff is kind of secondary or even worse.
So I think we've made a really big mistake there by not changing the messaging.
And I'll grant, put in handwashing if you want, but it shouldn't be the first thing that people see.
And I think we really screwed our response up very badly by having it as the lead thing when we must have known that was not the priority.
Well, I mean, it sounds like essentially what you're arguing is that public policy and messaging should follow the evidence base as best as we know it at any given time.
This obviously...
Zero disagreement from me and Chris on that.
And if you're making the point also, of course, that public health authorities make mistakes.
Yeah, public advice isn't always 100% correct.
Again, that's clearly true.
I think one way to resolve this is that public health messaging, it's best if it's nimble.
It's best if it can change.
When people like yourself are advising the public health authorities, they say, look, we've been saying this about handwashing.
Let's not talk about that.
Let's talk about this thing instead.
And maybe the whole thing could be helped by maybe upfront saying, look, Our best advice at the moment is this.
And, you know, just flagging up to people that it's subject to change.
It's not sort of drawn in stone with a chisel.
And I think people understand that.
I'm stuck on this World War II analogy, but I'm imagining Londoners in the Blitz or something.
And people are getting told, oh, you know, you should do this to whatever.
And then suddenly the next week it's, no, no, we actually should do this.
I think people get it.
They can handle that.
And I think that's a good idea.
So I think where Chris and I were coming from is really when the authorities do double down and pretend that...
Oh no, we're never wrong about everything.
We're perfectly infallible, like the Pope or whatever.
And that presents this sort of chink that the gurus like to use their crowbars to open up into.
It's entirely corrupt.
You can't trust them about anything.
That's where Chris and I are coming from too, which is that we're not so much defending authorities, the experts or whatever, more than anyone.
We know how they get them wrong, especially Chris and I and our respective disciplines.
But what we're pushing back on is literally these anti-establishment, anti-authoritarian.
Guru types who are just weaponizing those issues and not keeping them in proportion.
I think problems are understandable.
Mistakes are understandable.
Infallibility isn't to be expected.
And we're pushing back on people making out that it's entirely corrupt because of these mistakes.
Stuart, before you respond, I think I can make an analogous situation for you, which has also caused me personally hassle with the lab leak.
You've heard of this.
So, like, when I read the papers and saw the statements by various researchers, I didn't get the impression that absolutely nobody was allowed to discuss liabilities.
It was completely ruled out.
Even the papers which are highly criticized, which was the statement in The Lancet, and I don't think the early paper by Christian Andersen and co.
in science has actually been discredited, but it's often regarded as...
Unfairly negative towards the possibility of a lab late.
But when I read those papers, I didn't get that impression.
If you've read scientific papers, you know when people are saying, this is where the evidence strongly leans towards.
We generally believe because of this reason that that's the conclusion.
But they all included caveats that said, well, we cannot rule out and we'll need to do further investigation X, Y, and Z. And just recently, two review papers have come out.
It's been a...
A year or so since those papers came out, they did more review with lots more evidence.
And again, they're reaching very similar conclusions, even reviewing the additional information that's come available, loads of things to do with the Wuhan lab and also the genetics of the virus and whatnot.
But they reached the same conclusion, which is that it's likely to be zoonotic, but we can't rule it out.
And there are people in the field who take...
Different opinions, right?
Richard E. Bright, for example, or Jesse Bloom.
But that's normal.
There's always disagreement in a field and any issue where the evidence is still new, you're going to have these debates and things.
But I feel like people react.
I'm not saying that nobody, none of the researchers have made statements which are too strong that they've said there's no possibility.
It couldn't possibly be that.
And it's all just conspiracy theories.
They do because scientists.
Occasionally make those kind of statements.
But in the research literature, the line, to me, hasn't really changed.
Even that letter that people wrote saying we need to investigate it, it said that this is the position of the WHO and the EU, which are not these heterodox bodies.
So I guess my overall point and the tie to the COVID is just I feel that there is a level of tolerance for uncertainty and debate.
Which is in scientific fields.
And you've covered lots of stuff with fraud and things where that breakdown and false consensus.
But I think that the way that's reflected through journalism and stuff, there was a couple of months there where it was almost common knowledge that now the lab leak was proven to be most likely hypothesis.
And nothing had changed, right?
Just media narratives.
I take issue with that.
And now you get people who talk as if I've completely ruled out that lab leak could ever happen.
And if the evidence came out that was stronger, I'm just blowing in the wind with the general consensus.
Yeah, I agree that the scientific papers do have statements of uncertainty in them.
And then when that gets out into the media, and certainly when it gets out into the guru sphere of people like the Weinsteins and so on, you've made me become obsessed with them now.
You reviewed the book!
I review lots of books.
I'm not going after them in any sense.
But anyway, having said that, it's not just journalists and it's not just people like provocateurs on the internet who are responsible for bad scientific arguments getting out there and poor science being propped up.
It's the scientists themselves in many cases.
And I think that Lancet letter, even if it has been criticised overly by some people who are conspiracy theorists and so on.
That Lancet letter was weird.
It ended with a sort of almost Soviet-style thing about we stand with our colleagues with an exclamation mark on the front line.
Stand with our Chinese Wuhan colleagues.
I've never seen anything like that in a scientific paper before.
I don't think I've ever seen an exclamation mark in a scientific paper before.
It was just very odd.
And maybe you could say...
There's a pandemic and people were very emotional at the time and so on.
But I think there was something.
I don't think all of the blame for that letter being blown up into a big controversy can be laid at the feet of other people like journalists and internet gurus and so on.
I think that the scientists were really trying to give you the impression it's quite mad to believe in the lab leak hypothesis.
And that's regardless of my view on the lab leak hypothesis, which is, I think, similar to yours, which is...
I'll just go with what the general consensus is because I have no expertise in this matter whatsoever.
I think general consensus at the moment is we just don't really know and it seems most likely that it's zoonotic but there's some possibility that it might be a lab leak or there's some sort of middle scenario where the reason that it came from bats was because they were doing research on bats in the lab and there's some sort of middle way and then I don't understand how you would tell the difference between that and a fully natural zoonotic explanation.
You know much more about this than I do but I don't have any position on that really.
I do think it was weird the way that they wrote that letter.
And I don't think you can just say there was this lovely uncertain letter which was spun out into madness.
And I think that's the case for lots of things.
I say this in the book.
If you look at the research on press releases, for instance, scientific press releases, you find that it's not the journalists that are coming along and taking a scientific paper and spinning it into this, I don't know, taking a paper that's in mice and then making it sound as if it's relevant to humans, for instance, which is the classic thing that people do.
It's the scientific press release, which is often written by a scientist or a...
Or a press officer at the university, or both, that often includes the hyping up of saying this is an experiment in six mice to this is something which is important for all humanity.
I just think we can't take the scientists off entirely for this.
No, look, Stuart, I agree with you.
That Lancet letter, the tone of it was a bit weird.
You're right.
But I think you're forgetting that it was entirely a reaction against.
The sort of rampaging conspiracy theories and political stuff that was going on.
And yes, scientists should be above all that and entirely unresponsive to all the sort of cut and thrust of the politics and so on.
But it's perhaps missing the mountain for the molehill in looking at that rather than the other thing.
And correspondingly, just a similar example, I've seen...
A lot of commentary about how terrible the, this is getting into politics now, but how terrible the liberal types are or sciencey type people are for making fun of people using horse paste with ivermectin.
Oh, you know, horse jokes and stuff like that.
It's so terrible and whatever.
Just like I agree with you about the tone of the Lancet.
I agree.
It's not ideal, but it's kind of missing the context that this is reacting to.
An entirely deranged thing.
Yeah, I get that.
I get that.
And I just would prefer the kind of calm review of the evidence type stuff, which as Chris says, there's been a couple of papers recently that have done that, to the scientists writing an open letter thing, which I just think, I think I've done it once.
I think, I can't remember what it was, but I think I've signed an open letter.
Maybe a couple of times I've signed an open letter.
And I regret it.
I don't think scientists should be signing open letters.
I think that's just not a way that scientists should, you know, unless they do it in their capacity as a normal, as a citizen, and it's some political thing, then sure.
But it's often not the case because you write down your doctor or professor or whatever, and you write down your university name, where you're from and whatever, and you're using your scientific authority and it's stolen valor to some extent, right?
You're signing some open letter on some culture war issue or whatever it is.
And even when it's in a scientist's area of expertise.
It shouldn't be convincing to us if people write an open letter, I don't think.
I think they should be convincing to us if you write a review of the evidence or produce a new piece of evidence or some sort of statistical analysis.
However, that's what should convince people.
It should just be a wee bit frowned upon for scientists to be writing open letters and trying to convince people, especially if they have, I shouldn't focus on this because it's the sort of thing that, again, the Weinsteins focus on.
There shouldn't be an exclamation mark in the scientific thing.
It's a very minor thing.
And it's just like, get over it.
But it just rubbed me up the wrong way.
The point you make, Stuart, about, I think you make it really well in the book, about researchers hyping up research.
And Chris Crandall, I think I've got his name right, who did a whole bunch of research looking at the way language and abstracts was being inflated and who was responsible for it.
And you cover it really well in your book.
I actually can happily beat up on a whole bunch of things to do with mainstream science, right?
Like, you know, the replication crisis.
Your book is, in many respects, just a documentation of how the current incentives in science.
There is validity to the criticisms that even people like Eric, but he's not alone in it.
There's perfectly legitimate people who talk about the issues with publication bias and web, you know.
Yeah, like any number of p-hacking is like the least of the sins, even getting the outright fraud.
And in terms of letter writing, we know that when you get 100 scientists to write a letter about how the towers couldn't have come down by the planes, that that is not good.
And we know that 50 scientists writing about how ivermectin is something that should be, you know, promoted.
We shouldn't take those things.
For granted, but we don't see the same thing when it's an issue that we agree on.
And I think that an important distinction there is there's a difference between that and a statistic that says 98% of climate scientists agree with climate change.
But I'm curious that your book, when I read it, it's depressing, right?
Because especially some of the horrifying stuff.
I mean, there's a thing when psychologists just get something wrong about it.
Like facial feedback mechanism or power posing.
Sure, it can cost money and whatnot, but it's not really doing a huge amount of damage to the world.
But when you're talking about trachea transplants and stuff like that, those were shocking elements.
I'd recommend that anybody read your book.
But I think I put this question to you before, and you may have answered it in the last chapter of your book when you do what the Weinsteins and other people don't do, which is you highlight open science methods, you highlight pre-registering studies and so on.
But I was curious how you, as somebody that's, you're a scientist, you're a promoter of science, and yet you're part of an ecosystem that you've rightly documented.
The incentive structures are terrible in them, and there's a lot of stuff in it that's bad.
And I just wonder, how do you not flip into the dystopian view of The Weinsteins or the IDW sphere.
You know, I mentioned when we were talking about the book that they'd written, The Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, that they had really low standards for evidence.
So they'll just pick any old study, even if it's a pilot study or whatever, they'll use that to back up a statement in the book.
And you'd think if you were writing a piece of popular science that you would want things to be backed up by solid evidence in pretty much every case.
And if it wasn't, then you would say, I think it really is a matter of raising your standards.
I think what the replication crisis has shown us is that scientists in many fields, not just in psychology, but in many, many fields, and I try and cover other areas in the book, as you know, he talks about medicine and so on.
Scientists have had too low standards for too long.
This means accepting very small studies, underpowered studies, studies which are badly designed, studies which no one has tried to replicate, studies which have been analyzed poorly, and in some cases, studies which are false and, you know, not checking.
To an adequate degree, whether the studies are real or not.
And I think if you raise your standards across the board, then you're not a dystopian Weinstein type person.
You don't become a homeopath.
You don't become a vaccine denier.
You don't become a climate change sceptic.
You cut out a lot of crap science and you accept that there actually can be, and there is, lots of high quality science out there.
And as scientists, we should be trying to emulate that high quality science, whether that's stuff that's been done with the open science.
Techniques like pre-registering your research or sharing your data online or whatever it is, or just research that's very large scale and done using very high quality materials or whatever it is over a long period of time, whatever happens to be the positive aspect of it.
There is stuff you can learn from good science out there.
And raising your standards, I think, which is what I'm trying to argue in the book, immediately cuts off all that, the stuff that we look down on in terms of the sceptics movement and so on.
It cuts out the kind of blanket.
Scepticism, the uninformed, almost pseudo-scepticism of these kind of gurus who are saying, oh, you can't trust any science at all.
Because, for instance, you would look at the vaccine trials and see that they're extremely high quality in most cases.
Look at the Pfizer trials, for instance, and you would see that the health profile was looked at in extreme detail.
You would see that the side effects were looked at.
These were very high-quality, randomized controlled trials.
And you would not bring essentially random people who claim to have invented mRNA vaccines onto your podcast to come up with all these anecdotal accounts of babies' brains blowing up after a pregnant woman has the vaccine.
You would have a higher standard.
You would have a higher standard than to rely on that sort of evidence.
You would have a higher standard than going on Joe Rogan and Joe Rogan saying, "Well, I took ivermectin and I feel much better now," and then sitting nodding as a scientist, as Brett Weinstein does.
Nodding along and saying, yep, it's an anecdote, but here's another couple of anecdotes that also people have said that ivermectin made them feel better.
So I think you can make lots of criticisms of science, but they have to be ones where it's about raising the standards, not just replacing the bad science with bad reasoning of your own.
Yeah, better standards are better.
We should raise our standards.
More rigorous research will be good.
Very easy to agree there.
But I wonder what you think.
I do not know the answer to this, but I am aware across the world.
How tight funding is, how difficult it is to get research funding to actually fund those good quality studies, which are expensive, and the massive pressures on academics, especially the earlier in your career, the more pressure is on you to publish as much flashy stuff as quickly as possible.
It's an unfair question to ask, but it's clearly the cause of the problem, but I don't know how to fix it.
Yeah, people have asked, you know, I've done a talk on talking about statistical power, the idea that you need to have studies that are Large enough to answer the question that you want to ask and sometimes you're looking at something which might have a small effect and so you need to have a large study.
You're talking to an audience of neuroscientists and they do research with 10 mice in their experiment and that's dramatically underpowered for the sort of effect that they're looking for, in most cases even if they do find an effect.
That effect is likely to be a false positive because the only thing you're going to see in a study that's absolutely tiny is a large, probably spurious effect.
You feel bad to say to people, you're just wasting your time.
I think the analogy in the book I have is that you're trying to look for a distant exoplanet with a little pair of binoculars or something that you would use for bird watching.
Even if it's there, you're never going to see it.
And if you do see something, then it's probably just you've made a mistake.
You've looked at the wrong thing.
And people say to me, people say, but I have a PhD student who needs to have these papers out, exactly as you're saying, and needs to have several papers out by the end of their PhD.
What do I say to them?
What do I do?
They can't afford to do 100 mice.
They can only afford to do 10 or 15. And the answer to that is, there isn't really an answer for PhD students right now, but there's a larger sort of restructuring that we need where people need to be much more open to, for instance, collaborating across...
Different labs, putting together lots of different samples and collaborating across them using statistical techniques to analyze these things together.
That's the sort of thing that we need to have, this more collaborative model of science where we can work together on these questions and also a move away from the culture of needing more and more and more papers, right?
So there's a couple of different analyses now where you look at 10, 20 years ago, the number of papers that the average person finishing their PhD had published.
They went on to do a postdoctoral.
Job or become faculty.
The number of papers that they were entering that job with was two or three back then.
And now it's 10, 15, you know, in some fields.
Like absurd numbers like that.
Ridiculous amounts of publication that you have to have done in some areas anyway.
Just anecdotes, but I have heard, you know, really, really ridiculous numbers of papers that you need to have published to be competitive in these fields.
And it's still very useful me saying we need to change that.
I don't know how we change it.
These are broad cultural things that need to move away from.
We need to start.
Assessing quality rather than quantity and so on.
But I feel like maybe this is just my hope, but just having the conversation, just talking about it more.
You can see in the scientific literature that discussions of a crisis and so on are becoming much more common and have across the past 10 years.
It's into the public sphere.
My book is just one of the many things that have brought this to the public consciousness.
You talked to Jesse Singel a few episodes ago.
He's got a book that's really good on this topic as well.
Generally, people are talking about this much more.
And it had spread to some research funders.
They have at least said explicitly that they are not going to focus so much on quantity and focus more on quality.
They're not going to focus so much on flashiness and impact and so on.
So there were some research funders.
Here in the UK who have done away with the need for having an impact statement when you write a grant application to say, we're going to change the world of this, we're going to cure cancer, we're going to revolutionize treatment of depression or whatever it is.
They've actually done away with that statement and instead put in place something that says, are you going to share your data?
What are you going to do to pre-register your analysis so you don't kind of fool yourself into doing some kind of incorrect analysis and essentially have an open science, open practices type statement that will replace that.
So I do see some kind of movement to that and it does To some extent, it needs to be both bottom-up and top-down, right?
So you need to have the bottom-up kind of discussion of scientists criticizing each other and pointing out these problems and saying, like, being honest with each other and trying not to worry about hurting each other's feelings too much and saying, like, sorry, that paper just, you just can't answer the question.
I had to do a review where they had 50 post-mortem brains and they were trying to talk about numbers of neurons and cognitive abilities of the people that had died and obviously they measured them before they died and so on.
I had to say in the review, I'm sorry that you just can't answer a question like this with 50 brains.
And I know you've gone to great effort to get these 50 post-mortem brains, and I'm really sorry, but you just, as a reviewer, I have to say that this is a bad paper.
A few months later, I saw it got published somewhere else.
I didn't review it exactly the same as I had reviewed it.
No changes made whatsoever.
No caveats added to it, whatever.
But anyway, that's just how things work.
But I think we need to worry a little bit less about hurting each other's feelings or worrying about our prestige and our place in academia and so on, and just say these things.
And at the same time, we need to encourage top-down changes like the funders changing, like universities valuing different things.
As always, it's far easier said than done.
I do see some reasons for optimism, even though I also see regular stories of new fraud being discovered, new low-quality papers being published, people focusing on entirely the wrong things.
I think there's reasons for both pessimism and optimism.
One just has to try and make more people aware of this problem and more people both in science and outside science aware of the issue and just kind of hope that they'll do something about it.
I know we've used up way too much of your time and thank you for coming on and dealing with all our harassment.
But I do have one last moment of harassment while I've got you here and to end on like a non-controversial note.
You did a review of Cordelia Fine's Testosterone Rex book.
Right?
A couple of years back.
And you recently reviewed Carol Hoeven's tea book.
And I read Carol Hoeven or Hoeven, I'm not sure, book recently as well.
And I couldn't see your review because it was paywalled at the time.
And I know you were critical of Cordelia Fine's book.
So I'm basically exploiting the opportunity of having you on here and your goodwill to say, what's your tea?
On the testosterone wars and this latest salvo.
Yeah, I think what I said about the...
I don't remember exactly, you know, what I wrote about the Cordelia Fine book, but my view was that, you know, it had lots of good points to make about low-quality studies.
Again, there's been plenty of them in the world of endocrinology or psychoneuroendocrinology, linking hormones to behavior in the brain and so on.
Certainly a lot of low-quality stuff there.
But the general impression you get, I think, from reading...
We could talk about this for a whole couple of hours.
I think the general impression you get from reading books by Cordelia Fine and by several other people who are generally in agreement is that there aren't really that many differences between males and females neurologically or psychologically.
And any differences that there are, you should be quite suspicious of them.
And I don't think that's true.
I think there are lots of quite big differences.
Even if we don't know what they mean, there are differences in the brain of males and females.
One thing, males' brains are just...
But they have just a higher volume.
And whether that means anything, there's an interesting paradox because the measured cognitive abilities of males and females are just about the same.
They're just about average.
And yet there's this big difference in their brain.
And so, like, what does it mean?
Maybe it doesn't mean anything.
There's lots of research that needs to be done on that.
But I do find it a bit weird that the general impression you get from those kind of books is that there aren't any differences.
And, you know, people who are interested in these differences are maybe a bit suspect.
And so it's quite refreshing to read the Carol Hoven book where she says, look.
There's lots of uncertainty here.
I'm not saying that all sex differences are explained by testosterone or anything like that.
I don't want to go back into the line of the studies that were very rightly criticised.
But there are lots of things that we can criticise on the other side of the debate as well, and they've gone far too far.
So she talks about how people have argued that there's no correlation between testosterone levels and sports.
Performance, for instance.
And that's true within a sex, so within males and within females, there's not that much correlation between sport performance and testosterone.
But if you look between the sexes, where there are huge, enormous differences in the level of testosterone that's circulating, so the bell curve, if you look at the sort of effect size difference, are just enormously far apart.
They're a huge difference, very, very little overlap.
I can't remember the exact numbers, but it's larger than the height difference between males and females.
Substantially larger.
Then that does correlate with sport performance.
People with much higher levels, they're male, they'll be stronger and faster and so on.
So she talks about all that in the book.
I do recommend it.
It's a really good book.
There are some aspects that I criticise.
I think some of the genetic stuff is out of date and she talks about candidate gene studies, which I was not a fan of.
I think that was a bit of an unfortunate thing.
Someone should have told her that we don't do that kind of research anymore because it's underpowered, low-quality research.
We've moved on from that.
No one seems to have told her, and she didn't seem to have noticed.
But I think the general story there, that testosterone is extremely important in differentiating males from females, and that males are very different in terms of their strength and physiology and so on, and probably their aggression.
And that's in some way due to higher levels of testosterone.
I think she's uncertain enough about the more detailed psychological stuff.
Obviously, there's been really florid theories of how testosterone affects absolutely everything about people's behaviours in the past, which is...
Often based on silly, low-quality research.
But I think she does a good job of explaining the basics of it and saying, okay, let's just step back from the political stuff.
And she even has a chapter on transgender issues and doesn't really take a side on the kind of culture war, but uses the transgender stuff to illustrate the effects of testosterone and talk about it from a scientific perspective, rather than...
Going down the kind of the Brett Weinstein and Heather Hying line of saying, this is very bad, or going down the other line of saying, we must focus on this as the only thing that's important in this sphere.
So I think she does a really good job of being a testosterone moderate and sticking to the evidence.
The testosterone centrist, maybe.
Yeah, that's the impression I got.
Admittedly, I haven't looked into studies yet, but the stuff about holding infants and the effect that that can have on followers, testosterone levels was interesting to me.
Talking about comparing societies where males hold infants versus those that don't.
I share your feelings about a refreshing book in some respects.
Matt, lest I pull Stuart down another wormhole, is there anything you want to say before we let him escape?
No, I've got nothing more to say.
Two big swinging brains rub up against each other.
The real edifying spectacle.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I know it's just horrible, but that's one of our stock phrases.
You've been very cogent and informative.
Thank you, Stuart, for coming on and talking to us.
It's a great pleasure.
It's weird, actually, to hear you, to be part of the conversation because I've listened to so many of your episodes.
I think probably them all.
Maybe there's one or two that I haven't quite got around to yet.
And they've been so good.
I love what you're doing with all these gurus and so on.
Yeah, keep up the good work.
Thank you, Stuart.
Well, if you've heard a lot of them, then you'll know what I mean when I say that.
I feel like we've transcended our differences and raised them into a higher synthesis and really engaged in some good faith sense-making today.
So well done.
Well done, all.
We've went through gids, we've penetrated membranes, and in a lot of ways, we've kind of sieved Western civilization.
We've gone far beyond the pitter-patter on the neocortex.
That's right.
We'll be on that.
We'll be on that.
Well, three Nobels for everyone.
Everyone gets one.
Just for this conversation.
But thanks very much, Stuart.
You're a very patient man.
And yeah.
Oh, sorry.
You are a patient man.
I shouldn't have interrupted.
I wanted to say that we're going to link to some of Stuart's articles and links to Pye's books, of course, which is very important.
And other interesting things in the show notes.
Chris, please continue your thoughts.
I was just going to pivot to say that I recommend everyone get Stuart Burke.
I actually use your Burke, Stuart, on my course that I teach over here in Japan about research methods.
There is actually a...
A Japanese translation in the works.
We've signed the contract.
I don't know when it's going to come out.
I don't actually know how long these things take to translate and so on, but there is going to be a Japanese version of it at some point.
Yeah, and I know of one other researcher in Tokyo who also used your book as a foundation of its core, so I'll send you details about that, but this is the back-padding Prius segment of the podcast, but it's accurate.
It's true.
Thank you.
I'm glad you found it useful, anyway.
Thank you.
So, all right, since making ended, Matt, we'll...
Call things to close.
You're better at that than I am.
Yep.
That's right.
I'll close things off.
I can't remember what the links are.
I should have Stuart Richie's Twitter handle in my brain, but it's not.
But we licked everything to show Stuart.
Would you like to give Stuart a Twitter handle in case people want
Yeah, it's just my name.
It's just my name.
Stuart G. Ritchie.
So it's just my name with my middle initial in the middle.
That's my Twitter account.
Wonderful.
You're free to follow.
Thank you.
Fantastic.
So the music is fading in.
And Chris, you've got one thing more you want to say to me, I think?
