Interview with Michael Inzlicht on the Replication Crisis, Mindfulness, and Responsible Heterodoy
It's been a while but don't worry the DtG elves have been hard at work and a veritable bounty of content is on its way. The long-promised Jaron Lanier decoding is on its way next week, but this week the cross-overs continue as we are joined by Mickey Inzlicht, esteemed Psychologist, Research Excellence Faculty Scholar at the University of Toronto, and long term (retired) co-host of the Two Psychologists, Four Beers podcast.Mickey has now hung up his podcasting headphones but like an old prizefighter, we were able to lure him back into the limelight one last time with promises of unlimited booze and global fame. To keep Mickey from realising we could provide neither, we then subjected him to an unrelenting barrage of questions for almost two hours. Under our relentless questioning, Mickey gave up the goods on some precious long-buried information, including what it's like to work with Jordan Peterson, the details on his campaign to destroy introspection, and what he really thinks of the Gurus. We also manage to discuss some serious stuff like the state of contemporary psychology, the impact of the replication crisis, whether preregistration is always beneficial (it is, don't listen to Matt!), and to resolve the fundamental nature of the Self!Mickey is a wise egg, a funny guy, and a veteran podcaster and we really enjoyed this conversation so we hope you will too! Stick around at the end for some Tamler themed feedback and more pronunciation errors than you can shake a stick at.Back next week with Jaron Lanier!LinksMickey's HomepageTwo Psychologists Four Beers 27: Against MindfulnessBernard Schiff's Article on Jordan Peterson for the Toronto Star: I was Jordan Peterson’s strongest supporter. Now I think he’s dangerous.Inzlicht, M., & Friese, M. (2019). The past, present, and future of ego depletion. Social Psychology.Friese, M., Loschelder, D. D., Gieseler, K., Frankenbach, J., & Inzlicht, M. (2019). Is ego depletion real? An analysis of arguments. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 23(2), 107-131.Guardian article about that Facebook StudyHoehl, S., Keupp, S., Schleihauf, H., McGuigan, N., Buttelmann, D., & Whiten, A. (2019). ‘Over-imitation’: A review and appraisal of a decade of research. Developmental Review, 51, 90-108.
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 Professor Matt Brown and with me is Associate Professor Chris Kavanagh.
G'day Chris, how's it going?
Good morning, Matt.
Good day in the lingo of your people.
How was your morning swim?
Refreshing?
It was refreshing.
I think I'm getting over the hump.
And I've told you this, but I've lost...
I've lost almost five kilograms and at least some of that is an underestimate because it's been transmuted into muscle.
Yeah.
Also known as muscle.
I was going to say, I was going to mention, but you look like someone that's lost five kilos.
The unfortunate thing is that I'm at the beginning of that journey.
I'm going to lose five kilos.
So it's very annoying to hear someone report that I've just lost five kilos.
Oh, good for you, Matt.
Good for you.
It's all about state of mind.
You just need willpower and some moral fiber.
That's all you need, Chris.
Competitive drive.
I've got to beat you.
That's fine.
I'll get the six kilos, Matt.
Ten kilos of muscle.
But Chris, Chris, this is weird.
We're not alone.
There's somebody else here.
We're watching.
Yeah, we have an audience.
We have a guest and somebody who I've been trying to wrangle onto the podcast for.
Like a year.
Not his fault.
This is my ability to schedule things.
We have Mickey Inslicht from formerly Two Psychologists for Beers podcast, which is still ongoing.
But without Mickey, he's retired now.
Emeritus podcaster.
But he's also the professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto, Jordan Peterson's old aunt.
And I see on your website, Mickey, that you are a research excellence faculty scholar, not just a professor, research excellence scholar.
So welcome, Mickey, and thanks for coming.
Well, thank you so much for having me on.
It's quite a thrill to be on.
I listen to you guys nearly every episode, and it's just fun to be here.
And yes, I'm glad that you introduced me as being a professor in Jordan Peterson's former department.
I also co-author a number of papers with him.
This is true.
Oh, really?
I did.
So it's interesting, Ricky.
We've got some questions.
I guess it must say on probably the entrance to your department now that Jordan Peterson's former department fellow, he's now an emeritus professor as well, right?
He was given emeritus status.
I think he just claimed emeritus recently.
He actually wrote a scathing goodbye letter.
In the National Post, which is a conservative-leaning national newspaper in Canada, where he exoriated the department and all that he was put through, and just how terrible it is to be a professor these days in general.
It was not well-received.
Yeah, but they gave him the Emeritus thing anyway.
I mean, you know, I think the rules at U of T are simply, I think it's you have to be a professor for 20 years, and then you get to essentially retire, but you have some...
I think as an emeritus, you get like office space, potentially.
You might have an ability to still conduct research if you wanted.
I don't think he wants to do any of those things.
I think he wants to have U of T still, you know, affiliated with his name, I'm guessing.
We don't need to spend much time on this, but it did seem a very odd thing because like Jordan Peterson, whatever you think of him, fabulously successful, right?
wrote huge bestselling books, has sold out tours, the lecture to young men and various other people who might be interested in what he has to say, but he hasn't been teaching in a university for, I would estimate
five or six years or however long since he rose to prominence.
Yeah, I think it was 2015.
It was probably his last, maybe possibly 2015.
It's not the greatest surprise in the world that the university might.
Want you to move on from being somebody that's presented as an active participant of the department.
The vitriol seemed, some might describe it as ungrateful.
My reaction to that essay or op-ed was, I mean, it was kind of bullshit.
You left because...
You're incredibly successful, incredibly rich, and you have a platform that's far, far larger than anything that a university classroom can offer you.
So just be open about that.
You could say that other stuff, that other stuff that bothers you, but that's not the reason you quit.
That's just kind of nonsense.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That was kind of obvious to me too.
Mickey, this wasn't an initial question, but I promise that we won't force you to just endlessly talk about culture.
But having Jordan Peterson in the department and the University of Toronto becoming, for a little while at least, the ground center of campus outreach, right?
There were the videos with the students confronting Jordan and that kind of thing.
So I wonder, as somebody in that department and somebody that had a podcast, which also at times touched on culture war topics and heterodox issues, how was that?
Did that affect you?
In any tangible way, like being at the university or the student response, or was it very tangential to your academic life and all that kind of stuff?
Yeah, I would say more the latter.
So University of Toronto is such a great place to work and more or less leave you alone.
So, you know, there isn't that almost Hollywood image of the academic life is like, wild faculty meetings, people, you know, conversing in the hallways, a lot with that as well, but it's...
A little bit more.
Every professor has their own lab and they're kind of little fiefdoms.
So we're all very, very autonomous and independent.
So it didn't impact me too much.
But of course, I was influenced by it.
We would get these mass emails.
People would be very, very angry.
I would decide to email the entire department of psychology, you know, deriding him.
Or we actually had, I think, a philosophy grad student once carefully break down his arguments about gender and gender identity and why they were fallacious.
At the very least, it was entertaining, but it didn't, I wouldn't say, negatively impact me.
My own personal kind of response to it was, at first, I was a bit aghast at what he said, but then I thought a bit more about it and sat with it a bit more.
And I'm like, okay, he had an opinion about a controversial topic, and he had an incredible amount of pushback.
It seemed the pushback, at least at the time, was out of proportion with what he actually said and did.
And then I became quite sympathetic to him.
And then it kind of warmed up a little bit.
But I must admit that the longer he's been in the spotlight, the less sympathy I have for him.
And now I really don't have much at all.
I saw a piece written by, I guess it's somebody in your department, the person that was like one of the primary movers in hiring Jordan originally.
And he wrote a, it was quite personal.
Yeah.
Personal piece, but also relatively balanced, talking about the good qualities he saw and the things that he admired in Jordan, which he still sees.
But he had these concerns about the teaching method and the tendency to mix speculative idiosyncratic theories with more established research and not carefully delineate between the two of them.
And they also covered Jordan's disdain for the IRB process or the notion that anybody...
Should have the right to question the ethics of your research.
And I know that Matt, you and me, have all dealt with IRB boards, ethics review boards, and that they are often a bureaucratic nightmare to deal with.
That piece struck me that it sounded like, even before his theme, that there was some kind of conflicts in the department.
Maybe it was only between him and the review board and that kind of thing, but it sounded like there had been Conflict about people complaining about some of the content of lessons and then other people, like a very strong devotion to him from his students.
Was that dynamic notable beforehand in the department?
Or was it like just a very fringe topic that nobody would have paid attention to because everyone's in their silos?
Yeah, his nature, his polarizing nature was evident well before he rose to prominence and to fame.
So that article you're describing where Bernard Schiff was talking about Jordan complaining about the Ethics Review Board, I was witness to this because he had cc'd a letter to the IRB and he cc'd the entire department too, complaining about what he thought was a heavy-handed oversight.
And I agree with both you and Matt in the sense that yes, IRBs sometimes are bureaucratic and sometimes they're petty, but they're clearly required.
And some of the critiques of the IRB that he levied were so...
They were like, how can someone who's got a master's degree criticize me?
What if the degree you have had anything to do with whether something is seen as potentially harmful to a participant?
So it was just like he was in a position of authority and only people who had his level of education or his level of...
Status could opine on his work, and that was just silly nonsense.
But it went both ways.
He was a much-loved professor.
I would say in modestly positive reviews in my teaching evaluations, but I don't think ever, maybe one time, I've had one student say, like, my class changed their life.
But these were regular comments that he would get every single semester.
Like, a third of his students would be spellbound by him and say, this class changed my life.
And it was a regular occurrence.
It was just bizarre.
Until you actually spend some time...
In a room with the man.
And I know you guys talk about what it's like to be a guru.
You've got your gurometer.
I mean, that man just has charisma.
And by that I mean, there's something magnetic about him.
I remember very clearly, I was maybe my second or third year professor, and we had a little party.
He came with his wife.
And he was just in the back, not really holding court.
But whoever was around him could not look away.
There's something about the way he speaks.
You guys mentioned confidence.
I think it's also the musicality of the way he speaks.
There's just something captivating about him.
And I know one other person in my life who also has got this special power, the special power of charisma.
And no matter what he does, it doesn't matter what he does, he will have followers.
He'll have people who will agree with him and go to the end of the earth with him.
Yeah.
No, no.
Full points for style.
I mean, Robert Wright also mentioned that.
He said just one thing that all of the gurus we look at have in common is that they're just good talkers.
Unlike Chris, for instance, they don't say "I'm and are" a lot.
And yeah, they're just very eloquent.
So that's part of it.
The other part of it is the charisma.
And some level, yeah, they have to have it.
And I've watched a few of his videos and even the ones which are the attack videos, have you guys seen the one where they've spliced it where he's talking about rats?
You're the rat and the rat goes, it's courage ready.
But even with that extremely unsympathetic edit and talking about something that's probably nonsense, like his delivery is clearly compelling.
Far better than mine.
I'm tempted to adopt his time traveler fashion style for my lectures next year, like just to give me a bet.
You know, I'm not going to go.
I've seen where that leads, like showing up with Joe Rogan in a tuxedo, like he was just missing a rose.
So I'm not going to go that far, but a monocle, maybe a pocket watch.
I just don't know.
I think you should do it.
Yeah, you should do it.
You've got to go full steampunk.
You've got to look like you're in a Jules Verne novel.
Yeah, tough hat with a little clockwork.
Yeah.
So this is why we won't be as successful.
But Mickey, we didn't just bring you here to talk about Jordan Peterson.
That was up there.
But the other thing is that you are a psychologist, social psychologist.
That's all right.
That's not a slur to call you.
No, I'm a social psychologist, but I'm kind of in between social psychology and cognitive psychology.
Yeah.
And you've been really on the front lines, I would say, in the debates around.
The replication crisis and associated methodological reform efforts in psychology.
So I think most of our audience would already be familiar with the replication crisis in psychology, but summarize the past 10 years in psychology and what if you were given a primer for the replication crisis and the aftermath,
what's your like potted summary of the past decade or so?
Yeah, we have about 70 episodes of a podcast that cover this.
I'm not sure I can do it in a couple of sentences.
You got five minutes working.
All right, five minutes.
I'll try my best.
I think the basic idea is that for a long time, the history of our field, let's say, and I'll talk specifically about social psychology.
I think it's broader than social psychology, but I'll talk about social psychology specifically because I think that's really ground zero.
That's the center of the crisis.
For our history, we mostly conduct experiments.
It's an experimental field.
The results of these lab experiments were reliable, and they revealed little truths.
I mean, I think sometimes when we were especially proud of ourselves and grandiose, we thought maybe we revealed, like, bigger truths.
But truths nonetheless, small or big, these little factoids that we discovered.
And then we became so confident in our findings.
You know, when I was a grad student, there was a big push in the American, actually now it's called the Association for Psychological Science, to give away psychology.
We're so confident in the quality of our wares.
We thought, you know, we need to have far more of an impact in the real world and start giving it away.
And we should be as influential as economists.
And I was skeptical at the time that this would do anything.
But my God, the landscape in the past 20 years has changed dramatically for psychology in the sense of how visible it is.
When I was a grad student, yeah, you would see psychology in the news every once in a while, like basic research findings.
But now it's every single day, every single day in multiple papers that are talked about and discussed.
In the media.
So we're really, by some metrics, influential.
And, you know, we became very proud of ourselves.
We're doing good work.
We're influencing the world, influencing public policy, as we should be, because we're scientists.
But then, really, I would say, I think the date is 2011, typically, when people think of the start of the replication crisis, or at least the awareness, broad awareness, that, whoa, something is not right.
Maybe a lot is not right.
There were a series of papers published in that year.
One that just blew my mind.
It still affects the way I think deeply.
And this is a paper written by Joe Simons, Leif Nelson, and Uri Simonson.
They have a blog called Data Collada.
They're brilliant economists and psychologists.
And they outlined that the standard operating procedures that are done in psychology, but also in medicine, in economics, and other quantitative fields that use inferential statistics.
That these tools that we've been using, we've been using them incorrectly.
I think a lot of us kind of knew that we were using them incorrectly, but these same folks, the data cloud folks, they said, yeah, we kind of knew, but we thought it was, and we knew it was maybe wrong, but we thought it was wrong, like jaywalking as well.
Yeah, okay, I shouldn't be doing this, but it's fine.
And to translate that for the scientists, like, yeah, okay, I probably shouldn't be taking a couple of these shortcuts, but the data are there.
I'm just letting the data speak to me, reveal what they have to say.
But it's not...
Bad like jaywalking is bad.
It's bad like robbing a bank is bad or murder is bad.
It doesn't just lead us to make, you know, small errors.
It leads us to make massive errors.
In fact, it's possible and very likely now that a field, an area of social psychology that I know well, that's by some people's count has 600 empirical studies supporting it.
It's possible that all those 600 studies are just noise mining.
Even though there's 600 supposed studies that indicate an effect of what doesn't really matter what it is.
It's likely that none of those effects are real.
And how can that be?
And these are independent labs all over the world over a few decades doing this.
How is that possible?
And well, the first is what I already mentioned.
We've kind of abused our inferential tools.
By that, I mean like we've been doing our statistics incorrectly.
So we've been cutting corners, be that running small sample studies.
I see Matt, you want to get in there.
Sorry.
Oh, I just wanted to ask you, are you referring to that the ego depletion effect?
Is that?
Is that what you happen to be?
Yeah, I was referring to ego depletion.
So this is an area that I was involved with as a critic, a theoretical critic.
And I was very proud.
So I had this alternative model of how ego depletion.
Ego depletion is just like a model of how self-control works.
I'm very, patting myself on the back and very, I criticized the theory.
But for me, I still needed the evidence to be real, the phenomenon to be real.
I have a new explanation.
But then a year or two later, it turns out there's no phenomenon to even explain it.
Yeah.
Exceedingly painful.
And I, without.
Overstating it, I would say it caused dysphoria, maybe mild depression in me for a number of years.
I've been working on this, really thought this was real.
Can you imagine you're working on something, you're building something, you're building a house.
You think it's solid.
You're getting other people to look at your house.
Hey, beautiful house, great house.
You're winning awards for how beautiful your house is.
And then one day, it's like, there's no house there.
Yeah, or you built it, you forgot to put in the foundation, so it's all a waste of time.
And that's one of the most soul-destroying parts of this, isn't it?
Which is that...
Once the process gets going, so many graduate students and professors devote so many years and so much money to going on and building on something that turns out to be a waste of time.
Yeah, so it's important.
Yeah, I think you're right to characterize it as akin to murder, major crime, and not a misdemeanor, just because of the sheer waste apart from anything else.
Right.
And so I would say there are a few ingredients to like...
And by the replication crisis, and some people call it a credibility revolution.
Some people want to talk about the open science movement.
But whatever you want to call it, the key factors are abusing our influential tools, so otherwise known as questionable research practices or p-hacking.
That's one.
Another one.
And that's, I would say, relatively easy to solve.
And I think we're on the way to doing a lot better.
We haven't solved it, but we're doing a lot better now.
But some of the other factors are much harder.
So the second one is something called publication bias.
And that's just this notion that journals, editors, authors themselves, reviewers, they do not want null findings.
They don't want someone to have an hypothesis and then, oh, sorry, the hypothesis is incorrect.
You have a tough time publishing null findings, even though null findings, not always, but oftentimes, are very informative.
They can tell you, oh, this idea we had and the way we operationalized this idea.
That didn't work.
And if you give it a real honest try and tried multiple different ways, you can maybe have some more confidence that maybe the idea is just not correct.
And that's needed.
But those, you don't see those in the literature.
In fact, the last estimate I saw this in psychology, the rate of positive findings in the field is something like 93%.
That means 93% of scholars' hypotheses are confirmed, at least in the published literature.
And anyone who does science, is an active scientist, knows that's nonsense.
I would say I have, you know, two or three failures for every one success that I have.
And I don't think I'm a particularly poor scientist.
I just think we have questions, we wonder, and oftentimes our meandering questions are wrong.
So that's the second one.
I would say a third contributor to this replication crisis, and by that I mean things not replicating, you know, when tried independent scholars to try it again to see if you can just get the same effect just a second time.
And the third factor is that no one was doing conducting replications.
Or at least not what we call close replications or exact replications.
Some people were, but they couldn't get, they could not be published either.
So these three things led to a warping of an entire literature.
And I think this culminated in a landmark study in 2015 by the Open Science, what are they called?
Collaboration, they called it.
Then it was a group of 200 plus authors trying to replicate 100 established findings from two prominent journals.
And I think they were able to replicate 39% of those studies.
But in social psychology, only 25% were replicated.
And I don't think we should hold that number to be that's a holding number because there's all different reasons why that could be.
And for sure, there are going to be some errors there.
And also, we don't want replication rate to be 100% either.
That would also be a bad sign.
If you're replicating everything, that means you're testing things that are obviously true and you're not exploring and taking risks.
You need to take risks as well.
But I think we all can agree that 25% or 39% are probably true.
So, Mickey, I think you did a good job summarizing and also highlighting some of the reasons that the whole crisis was able to unfold.
But I wonder, since that situation has happened and you've talked about and we've talked in other episodes about the open science movement and attempts to make pre-registration more common and replications rewarded and many lab studies are becoming more common and that kind of thing.
I'm curious about your view.
Of the state of the field currently.
And there's kind of two sentiments that I see quite commonly, which operate in kind of polar opposition.
And one of them is that is prevalent in the heterodox sphere, which is that the replication crisis has revealed how little we can trust social science, how fairly politicized findings are, and that in essence, we would be better.
Starting from scratch or ignoring entirely the output of the psychology.
So that's on one pole.
And on the other side, you have people who emphasize that social psychologists are the ones that are leading most of the reform efforts.
They're the people who identified it.
And even if you go back to the literature 50 years ago, but even in 1998 and so on, there was a paper by Carr talking about...
Harking, hypothesizing half the results are known.
So it isn't that there was no one in the field that was aware of the problems or that, you know, wasn't pushing back about it.
And so there's maybe a more optimistic take that things are changing and there always were people doing good work in the field and the more pessimistic one that we need to slash and burn everything that existed.
And I wonder where you fall in your...
Yeah, that's a really good question.
I mean, I think I'm definitely not of the mind that we just start over, burn it all down and that this, you know, this is showing how corrupt psychology is and the psychology can't be trusted or science in general, social science in general can't be trusted.
I don't think that's correct.
I'm reminded of, I think it's a quote attributed to Churchill, democracy is a terrible form of government, except it's better than every other one around.
I think it's the same thing with science.
It might not be a great way of knowing things, but it's better than other ways of knowing things.
And why isn't science a great way of knowing things?
Because we make mistakes, sometimes decades-long mistakes.
The people, scientists, have egos, just like everyone else, and they have their pet theories they want to promulgate.
So it's definitely imperfect.
But what is beautiful about science is that criticism is not only allowed, it's encouraged.
And the peer review process for all its failings, I think Liam Bright, I believe, was one of your podcast guests, he was saying the peer review, you know, might not do much.
I was a bit skeptical about that take, but I'm open to it.
He's a philosopher, Mickey.
He's a philosopher.
But the point is, whether it works or not, criticism is certainly open.
And welcome.
And when you have enough people speaking their minds and criticizing, hopefully errors can be avoided, or at least eventually you can find the errors, track them down, and then not start over, but make amends and do better.
And that's what we're seeing now.
We're seeing a massive correction.
We're seeing a massive correction, and things have improved quickly.
Ten years is a really short period of time for a field to change.
And we're seeing norms have changed quickly in some things, like sample sizes.
You'd be laughed out of any journal if you tried to publish with what was a normal sample size just 10 years ago.
You wouldn't get even in a low-quality journal anymore.
So that's a massive change.
Open data, open materials, that's far more common.
Pre-registration, I know, is controversial.
I'm definitely on the pro side.
I believe that.
And I think I'm pro because it's good for the scientist, him or herself.
Yeah.
You only have to conduct right out of pre-registration and then wait a year or two until you get your data to realize how valuable it is.
You're like, oh!
That's what I thought was going to happen.
That's what I was going to do.
Because, you know, a year or two passes, maybe you peek at the data, maybe you have different ideas, and all of a sudden you want to analyze things differently or talk about things differently.
And, you know, pre-registration is not a handcuff.
You should be able to analyze things as you'd like, but stick to what you planned as well.
And we need that for our statistics.
We need that for confirmatory statistics, which our statistics are.
So things are definitely better.
Yeah.
A couple of thoughts.
I mean, one of them is that a lot of this discussion is centered around kind of experimental methodologies, right?
Where pre-registration makes a lot more sense and there is more focus on detecting whether an effect is there or not.
And like I myself tend to work in more large scale survey type population representative things where we're not really testing hypotheses, we're really describing.
And we focus more on effect size and there's a superfluity of significant relationships.
And we aren't really concerned with that quite so much.
On the other hand, I do tend to, I struggle a little bit with the pre-registration of this kind of thing as just a working stiff statistician person.
Yeah, I mean, my response to that is I agree with you that pre-registration is not for every field and every area.
But I think even what you're describing, you can do a form of pre-registration.
So for example, if you're working with a massive data set, you have the luxury of power, statistical power.
So you could explore to your heart's content on half the sample or two-thirds of the sample or whatever size of the sample, explore, find relationships, and then confirm with that sample that you'd not examine.
And then you have a robustness check.
That's a kind of pre-registration that's happening already and that's built into that kind of data set.
I'm just going to second, Mickey, Matt, and bully you because I'm probably more extreme in the view that I rarely see any instance where pre-registration wouldn't be of benefit.
And primarily, as Mickey suggests, to the researchers themselves, if not to the broader scientific community, because one, It does do the thing of letting the outside audience be aware of what you expected in advance.
But I find in my own experience with research groups that it reminds people what they originally thought.
And that often changes as people are looking at data and they, you know, just because of the way human minds work, we can trick ourselves into thinking, well, that's what I expected all along.
But when you have a record, you're like, well, I didn't mention it, though.
Previously, and it can help you detect motivated reasoning.
So I know that there's lots of tricks people can do, like they can pre-register things and not adhere to them, or they can make the pre-registration very vague and get a nice badge or like pre-register one study out of four and get a badge and so on.
So I'm not saying it's a silver bullet, but including with secondary data sets that just saying these are the analysis that I'm going to run.
These are the patterns that we are expecting to find.
I find very little case for why it would be a bad thing to do that in advance instead of after.
All right, I'm going to reply.
And here's the caveat, right?
I'm speaking in very personal terms here, just in gut reactions, right?
And in principle, I'm totally on board, right?
It's definitely, it's a good thing to do.
But just for me personally, like how I work as a statistician is if I find something, I tend to analyze it again.
In every different way that I can.
And if it doesn't hold up in all of the different ways, there's multiple different ways to frame it, then I often will reject a lot of things, right?
I appreciate that a lot of people don't do that or don't necessarily have the tools to be able to do it.
The other thing too, for me personally, again, is that our pre-registration tend, like we do a lot of contracted research.
So we have to make quite a detailed grant proposal and there's a contract where we undertake to answer.
These specific questions and do this particular methodology.
There's a 40-page thing that's detailing what we are planning to do, and we have to do that.
So we kind of, I'm just...
That's pre-registration.
Yeah.
That's a really interesting case because now you're contracted to do very specific things.
And as long as that contract is detailed enough and not super vague...
Then that's a form of pre-registration.
And also I would say the other thing you're doing is also a form of like with the multiverse analysis, right?
Trying to analyze your thing 20 different ways and only being confident when like the grand sum of them kind of lead in the same direction.
Contrast that with I think what was standard operating procedures pre-2011 and that would be Yes, I would do that.
I would test my thing five different ways.
It would work once, and I'd only report for one, and not even bother mentioning that I measured it three or four other ways.
The reason why I fundamentally agree with you is that I also advise a lot of graduate students who will naturally do that, not out of any ill will or maliciousness, but just because they want a good result.
They want success in their mind.
Motivated reasoning is quite a drug.
So you can convince yourself very easily that this one variable that's correlated with the thing you care about, and that one's significant, that's more important than the three other ones that are conceptually.
One thing I see so often is I see it amongst researchers who are less than confident in their own skills, methodological skills.
So they'll be in consultation with maybe more experienced academics, they'll have a theory, they'll have expectations, they'll do these literature reviews, and they'll essentially be convinced.
What they're looking for is there.
And then when they go and do their analysis and they don't find the thing that they expect to be there, their natural conclusion is that they have done something wrong and they need to work harder to find the thing that should be there.
So I agree with you, really.
I'm just being annoying.
I mean, yeah, science is cruel.
I mean, we tested these ideas and we think we're so right and whoa, I guess not.
Or at least...
This version of the way we've tested it didn't work out.
I have a bit of a left field question, because in part of your initial framing of this, one of the sort of implicit assumptions there, which is that the scientific framework, right, that epistemic, is the way to answer questions about human nature and society and how humans interact with society and so on.
Now, there's a lot of fields that are adjacent to society and many psychologists or people working explicitly in it, including some anthropologists, am I right, Chris, who don't subscribe to that epistemology and would say that there are other ways to do it around building.
It uses methods that are drawn from philosophy or even literature analysis.
I've got my own opinion about this, but I'm just wondering, I see two epistemics colliding, and this is where we're venturing on cultural territory, but I think it's an interesting rubbing up of two ways of knowing.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's a really interesting point.
I mean, you're holding my feet to the fire about, you know, science is the best way of knowing things.
I still want to stand by it, and at one point I thought you were going to say, well, there are other methods.
For example, there's qualitative approaches, you can do, like, focus groups, and I would, that's still science.
That's still a way of understanding the world.
Then you start talking about the humanities, what they can provide.
And I don't want to say they certainly provide lots of things.
I suspect the best psychology is not found in psychology.
It's found in literature.
Anthropology.
Don't give it to him.
Don't give him that point.
Okay, classical anthropology.
So, absolutely, there are other ways of knowing, but where it always comes down to, for me, is...
How do we know?
How can we test whether this intuition that we have or this observation that we have is some general, small g, general truth, right?
And just because I've observed it or I think it, it's hard to verify that without some systematic form of counting, of having controls.
And again, now we're talking about the scientific method.
So again, I think these approaches...
Absolutely enrich our lives and are absolutely needed and reveal truths that then can be tested and verified with the scientific approach.
That would be my epistemology.
Yeah, look, I'm basically with you.
I think the interesting thing about the scientific approach is that it relies on things you can measure and psychology pushes the boundaries, right?
Like we are a softer science than other sciences and weaker in many respects because our measures...
Are intrinsically less concrete.
We can do our best to make them as good as possible, but we fundamentally rely on observable, measurable phenomena.
And many things that are important to people in society are very, very difficult to measure.
And I suppose there's still space for other things.
And just to, I guess, agree with you about that other point, I certainly wouldn't include qualitative research in general.
As outside of the scientific approach.
In fact, Chris and I are going to cover for our Decoding Academia series, a paper by Anna Catter, who does amazing qualitative research, trawling through the internet, documenting all of the anti-vax tropes, essentially, that go on.
And it's extremely careful, and it's a great taxonomy or description of that there is very little narrative building.
There is very little capital T theory involved in making these expansive claims.
It is straight up.
Textual analysis.
So I think the qualitative research is an interesting sort of hinterland or demilitarized zone between these two contents, because some of it is like that and some of it is not.
Yeah.
Cherry picked, yeah.
There's a document which is like a terrorist manifesto for the replication crisis in the form of Daryl Bem's advice to grad students about how to do research and read a paper, right?
Which is still, I think...
Accessible, we'll link it in the show notes for the episode, but it essentially advises students to do all of the things that we're saying you shouldn't do, right?
And it presents data analysis as a...
Rhetorical tool.
Yeah, a tool of finding the story and basically that your data should tell whatever story that you can wring from it, right?
And you have to torture it until you can find the things, cut up the sample.
Until you get the significant results in the way that line up them and then revise your hypothesis so that it looks like you always did that and you have a neat story.
And we all know that that caused so many problems in the discipline.
And in some sense, he did a service of laying it out in the same way as he did with the paper claiming to have demonstrated that you could influence things backwards in time.
He had a paper about doing the stimulus after recording the things and that the influence could still be detected.
Time travel of stimulus, which was obviously wrong, but the results appeared to be correct according to standard statistics at the time.
So Daryl Bem is useful in many respects because of demonstrating these things.
But that mentality, I thought, well, Matt, when you're talking about arts and humanities and more qualitative approaches, that in some respects that meshes better with that mindset, right?
I feel like what The more focusing on the empirical data and being more restrained in how larger generalizations are, right?
That this is a sample of undergraduates in North America.
Therefore, I will not make claims about universal psychological processes and that kind of thing.
There's something of a congruence between the way Daryl Bem talked about good psychology and the psychology that led to the replication crisis.
And the kind of tendency in arts and humanities subjects to value theoretical beauty and storytelling above accepting the limitations of empirical data.
I might be the anthropologist representative, but I think the arts and humanities approach can be limiting in the just soul story variety.
I mean, I think, you know, narratives and stories are so compelling.
We're just so drawn to them.
So at some level, Daryl Bem's advice is good for communication, right?
It's like, it's a nice way to communicate, an effective way to communicate.
But science is messy.
Data are messy.
And I'm not sure we're doing anyone a service by making it too clean and too much like a story.
I think you still need the narrative when you're writing.
Otherwise, it'd be a horrible thing to read.
But I think we should embrace the messiness and be honest about it and open about it.
I think that's also how we gain trust from the general public is by showing our warts.
And that's why I think I disagree with Chris.
The original question was my perspective, whether we should burn it all down or there's some good stuff here.
Oh, Matt, I lost my train of thought.
I talked about the early or the kind of you being that psychology is we've reviewed so many flaws and such.
Bad methodology that we need to burn it all down and start from scratch.
Right.
So I was going to say that I think this process we're going through, the messiness, the fighting, the ugliness, I think makes us more trustworthy.
Look, we're struggling with this.
We're trying to figure out what is true in a complicated, messy world, in a field that doesn't have things that are easily measured.
And it ought to be messy.
And we're realizing that.
We're figuring it out.
I don't see this as a reason to burn it all down.
I see this as, I mean, it was a massive mistake.
I wish this happened before I started grad school, but it's happening now.
And it is what it is.
We're getting our house in order.
So there's more reason to trust it, not less reason.
Yeah.
One of the things that bother us is how the criticisms of academia from the outside, from the gurus, from the heterodox, is that we're...
That academia is kind of this echo chamber where there's reflexive defence of fields and so on.
And as this incident has shown, it's not like that at all.
Nobody wants to waste their time.
And there's just been a huge effort to try to fix these problems and a massive amount of robust internal debate.
And yeah, we should start to see the results of it.
Yeah, no, I just think it's interesting.
I mean, when I was younger and earlier in my career, I would have been much more a cheerleader for psychology.
It's our common field.
And rubbing up against anthropologists and philosophers and humanities people, it's given me some appreciation for...
Some of the intrinsic limitations in our field.
And by accepting them, it's not like giving up.
It's just acknowledging them puts us on a firmer basis.
I already mentioned the issue of measurement, but I think Chris alluded to another one, which is the issue of contextuality, right?
So, you know, anthropologists are all about that.
They're all about talking about this particular culture in a particular place in a particular time.
And psychologists, we don't want to do that.
We want to talk about human universals.
We can't work with people detached from space and time, can we?
Yeah.
I mean, in some ways, the replication crisis has, and most of the discussion has been on these technical solutions, almost bureaucratic solutions, and they're great, but it's the absolute lowest bar for a science to have a thing be replicable.
The next bar is, does it mean anything?
Does it map onto the real world?
How is it coherent with other little findings?
So we're talking about theory, we're talking about measurement, we're talking about...
Applicability.
So a big thing in social psychology, at least, is these little lab studies.
And I mean, for most of my career, until maybe about five, ten years ago, I was like, I only conducted experiments because that's the only way of really knowing things.
And now I'm like, it's actually a horrible way of knowing things.
Yes, we get a causality.
That's a beautiful thing.
Wonderful thing.
But when you leave out so much of the world...
Who cares whether your little thing moves something else in the lab?
In the real world, it does absolutely nothing.
We don't know that.
So that's kind of similar to Chris.
I've heard you in one of your podcasts talk about the dangers of going from in vitro studies to then in vivo.
And I think that's also a massive problem.
So all this stuff, all this kind of hanging is, I think, healthy and good.
And we're hopefully changing for the better.
And I think, again, it's positive.
It's been very painful, but positive.
There's a study, Mickey, that I think meets that point.
I use it usually in the introductory courses that I'm teaching, where there was the Facebook study about influencing mood and emotion through what you display in the timeline.
And probably it wouldn't bother people so much now because there's not so much attention on Facebook, just amongst the boomer generation.
That study was presented as if it showed that Facebook has the ability to completely alter people's By simply a few tweaks to what they show on the algorithm.
And I'm on board with the people who argue that, you know, social media algorithms are important and they can drive radicalization.
The focus on attention above all was doing a lot of damage.
But that particular study, it had the graphs that showed like, okay, this group was showing more negative words than anything.
But like, when you actually looked at what the metrics are, it was something like one Or like 0.8 extra negative words out of a hundred words in status updates.
And it was using like semantic language analysis.
So it was categorizing all these words in a very coarse way.
So it was a tiny, tiny effect.
And of course it was significant because the sample was hundreds of thousands of people, but it was for practical purposes, it was tiny.
And you're basically saying, The actual result is if people see more negative things, they might in turn be slightly more negative.
And you're like, okay, we already knew that.
And this didn't demonstrate that Facebook has the power to massively manipulate people.
This demonstrated that Facebook, through the thing that it did, has the ability to adjust how many negative words people used out of every couple of hundred.
And that just like...
It's such a difference, right, from the way it was presented in the media as Facebook has mind control powers versus what people read will have a slight influence on them, maybe.
Right.
It's such an anonyme finding, isn't it, as well?
It's like, of course what you read is going to impact you a little bit.
Yeah.
If it didn't, you're probably not reading.
You're not paying attention.
And it's amazing to think back at the reaction to that.
And that was a terrible what...
The whole blowback to that was terrible for science.
Because Facebook is still experimenting all the time.
They are.
We just don't know about it now.
We don't know what the results are, what they're doing.
Because of course they're going to do it because they want to maximize their profits.
Yeah.
The A-B testing is still going on.
But I think that did have a good issue or a good potential ethical debate about the ethics of experimenting.
On people via terms and conditions, right?
When you sign up on page 12, there's a thing that say, we might run social experiments on you.
But that's a legitimate point.
But at the same time, these companies have access to the massive data sets and they actually could do these really fascinating studies that would be of relevance.
And now everyone is on social media.
It's definitely of relevance.
But like you say, the public blowback, I'm sure.
It largely discourages companies from doing that because anytime that results come out, like the stuff about Instagram and the effect on teenage girls, it immediately becomes an outrage and there needs to be hearings and so on.
And I'm not saying that social media companies don't need oversight, but I think that there's a lot of like political...
Stuff that goes in, which is not like matched by what the research is actually showing or what they've been able to do.
So sorry, Matt, that's a hobby horse.
Social media is definitely something that I bemoan a lot as well.
So we just finished our first study about Twitter, which is kind of interesting.
Twitter is good, actually.
What was the result, Nicky?
Breaking news.
The coding that goes gets the scoop.
Take that, nature science.
Help the use of my time.
Please tell me that.
Yes, no surprising results.
But yeah, I mean, you know, one, logging onto Twitter is associated with less positive affect or more negative affect.
And the effect size is about as large as the positive effect is of a social interaction.
The social interactions are on...
Generally positive, not always.
And it's about the same size but in the opposite direction, but massive variability.
Massive variability.
Lots of people show positive effects.
Some people show massive negative effects.
We also found effects, again, nothing surprising.
Effects for polarization and increased polarization.
It also, despite it having it, I should say increased, I shouldn't use causal language, associated with polarization.
Despite it having, being associated with poor, let's say, well-being, there was a positive effect for sense of community and belonging.
So it does seem to operate in giving people, you know, a sense of, of a group and cohesion, but it's not necessarily, it's not necessarily, you know, positive feelings overall.
Well, I have to say, Mickey, I have seen some evidence for this in my immediate network.
Never!
Let's move on from replication crisis and that kind of thing, but I, I just, I got to say one more thing about it, then I'd be curious about your take on this, which is that...
I'm really happy that it's being dealt with, and one of the reasons I'm really happy with it is that I think that there are a lot of findings in psychology that are super robust, that are real, that are not these negligible, tiny little effects that you can only find in a lab,
but are actually meaningful in a real-life circumstance, like the thing you just talked about with Twitter.
And they get the stuff that's fake.
Well, not fake, yeah.
The stuff that's fake is more flashy.
You know, it's more appealing.
It makes for a better science news article headline.
It's more satisfying.
It'll be talking about ego depletion or something like that, or it could be counterintuitive.
Whereas the stuff that I really like or the stuff that I think is important, and I'll just give an example, and I just want to invite you guys to give examples of ones that might pop into your head.
But like in my field, we see these massive differences, say, between males and females and their propensity.
For addictive behaviour.
And we see that we can identify some of the causal mechanisms here.
It's still a bit murky, but there's DRD2 receptors and things like that.
And there's sensation-seeking, rash impulsivity involved.
And we see the correlates with a whole bunch of other risky behaviours.
This explains to a large degree why.
Cross-culturally, males do more dangerous things.
They have more car accidents.
They get into more fights.
There's a whole bunch of things going on.
They make more podcasts.
They do make more podcasts, that's right, because we're more willing to embarrass ourselves publicly.
And, you know, that's important.
It tells us something about human nature and, you know, has interesting theoretical roots in evolutionary psychology.
And it's just the kind of result that nobody thinks about much or talks about much or thinks that psychology has anything.
to tell us about because it's not covered, it's not talked about on Twitter and it's not covered in the news because there's more exciting, flashy stuff to talk about which probably isn't real.
Yeah, I'm glad you're talking about this because I wouldn't want listeners to think that all psychology or even all social psychology is bunk.
I think there's solid findings in there, lots of them, that are meaningful and impactful.
So you mentioned one.
The canon that I like a lot is stuff from judgment and decision making.
Where Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, a few decades ago now, discovered that we are not rational agents, like economists tell us.
And in fact, there are predictable, irrational things that we do.
And many of them are interesting, they're very robust, and they're important.
They impact all kinds of decisions in many, many spheres of life.
Whether it be a general manager picking a player for a sports team.
People getting insurance, people investing.
Right.
It impacts a wide, wide-ranging impact.
So that's just one class of examples, but there's lots out there for sure.
To complete the triangle, it's the wrong way to put it.
I can't think of the word I'm thinking of, but to answer your question, the one that would come to mind from my own experience is that in the research on imitation and over-imitation, and this is slightly like a counterintuitive finding, but I think one which has...
Born out to be correct is that you might imagine that humans are better and produce more cultural products because we are more logical and more orientated towards goals.
But a lot of the research with children and with adults, and also including comparative psychology, comparing us with our closest evolutionary relatives, chimpanzees and other apes, we have a propensity to over imitate.
To imitate things which have no obvious causal or instrumental purpose.
And this means that we're very good at imitating things, but also that we do stupid stuff.
Like if you give people the famous example is the puzzle box and you get them to tap on the box and do various things to get a reward.
And then you show the transparent version of the box where you can see that most of the things that you're doing, the tapping and pushing sticks into holes, is not doing anything.
And it's really only the last step that you need.
Chimpanzees and other primates are smarter in a way.
They go just for the goal and drop all the unnecessary stuff.
But children and also adults tend to copy the unnecessary behaviors because they socially intuit that there is some reason that people are making them do that.
And that's a good reason that we can end up with cumulative culture and other species can't.
So that's a really robust finding, one that I think is interesting about human nature.
And I think it's good to...
Highlight that these kinds of findings are coming from the same discipline that is dealing with Diedrich Stapel and outright fraud, but there is lots of good stuff there.
And that's why it is important to emphasize that as well.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It'll ultimately be a very positive procedure to winnow back the chaff and the frost.
And because the core that remains is still substantial and important.
So yeah.
Just ending it on a positive note.
Miki, I have a slightly different question.
And I do want to get your take a little bit on the gurus of the psychology world or the ones that we deal with in general, because I think you're also familiar with the IDW superstars.
But before that, the mindfulness literature.
I know this has been a topic, you covered it brilliantly on your podcast.
You've also been on papers, I believe, on the topic.
But mindfulness.
As for those who don't know, is kind of a hot topic, I would say still a hot topic, though there's been some pushback in psychology and positive psychology and clinical psychology as well, looking at using introspective practices, usually drawn from meditative traditions as interventions for a whole range of things for well-being,
but also for behavioral problems and addiction and so on.
So the general reception of mindfulness, I would say, is hugely positive amongst academics, amongst Western intellectuals.
Often it's presented as an alternative to chemical interventions, right?
Antidepressants or so on.
You've had a different take and some criticisms about that.
So I guess I want to ask...
What's wrong with Sam Harris?
Why do you hit him, Mickey?
Why do you hit Meditative Masters?
And what's your problem with Eastern Wisdom?
Enlighten us.
Yeah, that's funny.
So let me give you a little background.
So we had a podcast episode a few years ago now, Against Mindfulness.
It might be one of my favorite ones that I recorded with UL.
And it sprung from, well, from a few reasons.
Actually, it sprung from actually a Sam Harris podcast where...
He was taking, who was it?
Adam Grant to task, who wrote, I think, an op-ed a number of years ago now, saying not everyone needs to be mindful.
And Sam Harris was trying to convict Joel and push him to be like, why?
What's your problem?
And I just thought, wouldn't it be interesting to take a more skeptical, critical take?
And to give a little bit of background, personal background, so I was an avid meditator for four years, all through grad school.
An hour a day, 30 minutes in the morning, 30 minutes in the evening.
I went to retreats.
I went to a Zen center.
I was really into it.
And I have a few papers, a number of papers on the topic as well.
So at one point, I clearly thought there was something there.
I was very curious.
That's why I started doing it.
And my conscientious person just started kind of meditating and it kind of was a thing.
But after a while, at least for me, maybe I suck.
I'm not a master meditator like Sam Harris.
At one point, I was like, I'm doing this for four years and I'm still a little good at this.
And maybe one never really gets good at it.
And I'm like, I'm not sure, at least for me personally, what the benefits are.
Maybe it works for other people.
Maybe they're getting more media benefits.
Maybe there were benefits and I'm just not conscious of them.
Whatever.
So I just kind of put it aside.
Still thought there was something real and whole there.
And that's why we did, we conducted research on it.
And the research I conducted was specifically linking, be it mindfulness, like as a, as a construct or meditation as a practice.
One's cognitive ability, specifically executive attention or cognitive control, which is a form of attention.
Can you control your attention when they're distractors, for example?
And that's actually my main line of research is on control and attention and effort.
And we found some positive results that got published, highly cited now, more cited than most other things I published because mindfulness has this power.
People are really, really attracted to it.
But I'm not sure why at some point I just started getting sick of it or skeptical.
Maybe it's because I'm a contrarian.
I'm disagreeable.
And I have this graph somewhere where it looks at the number of publications per year.
And it's like, yeah, it was around the year, I would say 2005 or maybe a little bit after then, where there was a massive explosion, massive explosion, like in papers, in the academic literature.
The Dalai Lama gave a talk at the Society for Neuroscience.
He's a religious leader giving a talk at the Society for Neuroscience.
And it just, so many people are saying this is the next best thing.
No, it isn't.
So I just started looking a little more at the literature with a little bit more of a skeptical lens.
And I'm not the only one who's going to push back.
A number of other people have pushed back.
So I think the critique are a few folds.
Number one, like when we talk about meditation, it's thought to cultivate the state of mindfulness.
And by mindfulness, typically that's defined as...
Being able to attend in the moment, kind of having a keen attentional capacity to be present right now.
And also there's a second factor, which is also evaluative or non-evaluative stance.
So paying attention to the moment, but also not evaluating good or bad what you're seeing, just accepting your experiences, whatever they might be.
And it might be that the second part is more important than the first part, even though the first part seems to get a bit more attention.
Attention gets more attention.
But now...
As Matt mentioned, in our field, it's really, really, really important that we can measure things.
If we are saying that mindfulness does, like, what it's supposed to do, it improves sleep, it improves mental health, happiness, makes you more productive, of course, your attention, of course, you know...
Anything under the sun.
Probably makes you better at sex.
I'm not sure if that's a real claim.
Absolute sex.
That's what we want.
So, and mindfulness does this.
And we're being told to cultivate mindfulness.
If we want to be able to verify that claim, we need to be able to measure this thing.
And there are numerous scales out there.
Numerous scales.
In fact, a small bit of trivia.
I think the first scale was published, it's going to be like early 2000s, by Kirk Brown and Richard Ryan.
And Kirk Brown was a graduate student at McGill when I was an undergrad there, and he was the one who introduced me to Buddhism.
It's kind of an interesting connection.
He developed the first scale, the Mindfulness Attention Awareness Scale or something like that.
But there are many, many others.
The problem is that these measures don't act like a mindfulness measure should act.
So they are reliable.
So that's a good thing.
By reliable, we mean, you know, if you ask someone how mindful they are with these various measures, they score about the same or at least rank order is stable.
So if you're high on time one, you're going to be high on time two.
That's pretty good.
But in terms of validity, in terms of it actually mapping onto the construct, it doesn't seem to act like it should.
So for example, there's one kind of humorous study showing that binge drinkers are higher in mindfulness than are regular practicers of meditation.
Okay?
And that's a nonsensical finding.
Now, there's also an easy explanation of why that might be.
Because it's assuming that meditation...
Lead you to become more mindful, which it might not, but let's assume it does.
And then you're asking questions or answering questions about how mindful you are.
How able are you to attend?
How able are you to stay focused?
How able are you to accept the content of your thoughts?
Well, the more mindful you are, the more you might realize how shit you are at those things, right?
So the practice of cultivating mindfulness might lead you to score lower on this scale.
Okay.
So it's an awareness scale.
It's a scale that's trying to get at the quality of your awareness.
It's just a hard thing to measure.
It's such a common thing.
I remember I did my honors project way back in the day.
Fourth year.
50 years ago.
Yeah, 50 years ago.
In the olden days.
Rode to the lab on my penny farthing and did my honors project on transformational leadership versus transactional leadership.
And now, this totally different field, organizational psychology, but… Nothing to do with trans topic, the popular one of these.
No, we're talking again!
But it had the same features, right?
So, transformational leadership, right?
You inspire people, you show a mission, and you help them grow and all this shit, right?
It's sexy, right?
It's the kind of thing psychologists and everybody wants to be true.
And it's extremely appealing to people who managers and stuff like that.
They all want to be a transformational leader.
Everyone wants to be mindful.
Everyone wants to be more self-aware and all that stuff.
But ultimately, yeah, so it's contaminated by a massive amount of social desirability.
If you get other people to rate the manager, then it's contaminated with kind of just how much they like them.
And so there's these simpler explanations, which were just totally disregarded in favor of this nice theoretical one, which also flattered the Ambitions or the self-image of everyone involved.
So even without knowing any of the literature on mindfulness, I'm just generally sceptical to the whole field of positive psychology, which probably unfairly, but just because it has the same quality to me.
I know the kinds of questions or the things that attract us all and the things we want to be true.
And I also know just how fuzzy.
These concepts aren't how difficult they are to measure.
And it doesn't mean there isn't potentially some reality there.
It's just that we're not well equipped to address it.
And I'm also content, my final rant, the final thing that contaminates my thing is partly through dealing with some of these gurus and people I've known in my personal life.
Like I've met people that have got into meditation and they've been like the most not very happy people.
Lots of problems with their relationships, problems with their life.
And, and you can see how Buddhism and meditation is a way to fix that.
And I've had them proclaim to me solemnly one day that they had achieved enlightenment and that they were enlightened now.
And then they would proceed to just fricking lose their temper at some tiny little thing.
Right.
Behave tribally.
Be skeptical of anyone who claims to be enlightened.
That's an extreme example, but I think a lot of the people that You can't help but be skeptical and compare that to me.
I do all the bad things.
I don't do any meditation or any of those stuff and I feel I'm doing all right.
I will say this is probably a good opportunity to address this because there were people in our, well, a person in our subreddit and talking about our Apparently negative attitude towards introspective or meditational practices.
I think primarily Matt's negative attitude.
Introspection is overrated.
Forget about it.
I would say here, and I think Matt, you would agree, that I've got nothing against introspective practices.
Like you, Mickey, I had meditation practice.
I was very interested in Buddhism.
I studied Buddhist history in university at SOAS.
I still do have an interest and I find much of value in those traditions and in introspective practices.
But I think what I would argue for is being more realistic and less aggrandizing about what they're providing.
And that's what it's supposed to engender.
It's supposed to engender, like you said, make greater self-awareness of limitations and of the biases in your perceptions.
It often doesn't come to that.
It's accompanied with a perception that you are more enlightened or virtuous, self-aware than other people, even if other people don't agree with you.
So I think that introspective practices can be great, but you have to be realistic about what they do and what they achieve and what they have achieved for you.
But that point you made, Miki, about the Dalai Lama addressing an audience at a...
Conference, you know, scientific or psychology conference.
That always struck me as something, especially after I'd spent time studying Buddhism and the history of Buddhism and the fascination that the West has with Buddhism in a very specific format, that kind of Western Buddhism.
We talked with Evan Thompson about it before.
But this notion that I cannot imagine a social psychology conference has as a keynote speaker, like a Jesuit priest.
Lecturing them on contemplative prayer and saying, look, here's how we can get people to do contemplative prayer, focus on the mysteries of the stigmata or whatever the case may be.
People would not like that because they would see it as religion intruding on research, non-appropriate manner.
But when there is a Buddhist priest, and even if they're in Buddhist robes, using terminology, From the Buddhist tradition, it's kind of given a pass, or even worse, like regarded as cool.
And the only reason for it is because of ethnocentric projection that Buddhism is exotic and interesting and Christianity is like traditional and distinctly not cool.
Although Jordan Peterson did his best to try and reverse that.
But yeah, that double standard always struck me in, I think it's in psychology, I think it's in Western academia in general.
That Buddhism and Eastern traditions are treated very differently than religious traditions that the West is more familiar with, like Judaism or Islam or Christianity.
Well, I think it's because of the, you know, and Evan Thompson talks about this very clearly, this notion of Buddhist exceptionalism.
It's not actually a religion, at least according to philosophy.
It's a philosophy.
So you can throw away all the talk about deities and gods and prescriptive practices, and it's just...
You know, it's a way of cultivating attention.
So I think that's the way, that's the sidestep that was done there.
I disagree with Chris here a little bit.
Like, I think Buddhism is...
Sorry, I'm sorry.
I'm sorry, Chris.
I think it's objectively cooler than the other monotheistic...
You're a victim of Buddhist propaganda.
DT Suzuki was aiming his eyes at you.
Even allowing for all of the Orientalism and so on.
The Western monotheistic religions are fundamentally about sin and repentance and purifying your soul.
Hey, how is that different from karma and merit?
Right?
Like the traditional reading of Buddhism is about escaping the cycle of rebirth.
And it's even worse because the people who get disabilities or like it used to be seen as karmic demerit was why you were born a woman instead of a man.
I admit that's not very cool, but how do you get there?
It seems to me in Christianity you get there by following the rules and not doing X, Y, and Z. And with Buddhism, it seems like you've got to get there by more mindfulness or something.
Look, Mickey, I'm sorry you've met this Buddhist propagandist here.
What about Judaism?
Which is better, Judaism or Christianity?
Let's talk Turkey.
But the Buddhist way to, depends on the tradition, and the Western versions do emphasize like introspective practices.
But if you follow most of the, like Buddhists in the majority of the world, practicing Buddhists, the right thing to do is follow a whole heap of restrictive monastic rules about what you can eat, about who you can and cannot sleep with, what you can and cannot do with your own hands,
and including...
Restrictions on how much air you should have if you're living the monastic lifestyle correctly.
Chris, those are the unimportant parts.
That's not core to the religion.
That's a timer.
It's a bugbear.
It's a bugbear.
I want to just say one last thing about my critique of mindfulness or meditation.
I talked about the construct of mindfulness, but of course, we can sidestep mindfulness altogether and just look at meditative practice and see if it does have an effect.
And people have now conducted really rigorous meta-analyses.
And there's one, I think published a number of years ago now in, I think it was JAMA, so Journal of American Medical Association, a really prominent journal.
And it found that the effects are modest, small, or non-existent, comparable to other therapies, comparable to exercise, compared to taking a medication.
If, you know, assuming that, and that's not even accounting for like...
All the nonsense that goes in.
P-hacking, publication bias, that's just a straight-up meta-analysis.
We don't want to take some of these safeguards.
So, if I've got a choice, and the outcomes are going to be the same, would I want to sit on my cushion for an hour?
Or pop a pill on my day?
Or go for a jog, which we know actually has far-ranging positive effects.
Not just on mental health, on physical health, longevity.
It's a great thing to do.
So that hour that I spent every day for four years, I could have been working out and have been a much more attractive human being and healthier.
So I think at some level, it's also opportunity cost for engaging in this thing that is not clear how effective it is.
And at best, it might be as effective as other things we can do that might have other benefits.
You're basically describing my lifestyle.
I get up in the morning, I swim some laps, swim my 1.7 kilometers.
And popping the pills and the drinking to finish off the day and I'm as happy as Larry.
But yeah, mindfulness in that sense is the same as pretty much every other psychological therapy that we try.
They all kind of work a bit.
It's hard to say which one helps more.
I did learn very recently about a very interesting finding.
I can't say who it is because it's under review and they don't want me to say that.
Prominent researchers, happiness researchers in Canada.
They scan the literature for what What things lead to happiness?
You know, so people claim, you know, gratitude leads to happiness or meditating leads to happiness.
And then they looked at how many studies in these various little effects were pre-registered, all right?
And not a single study, there's not a single pre-registered study showing a link between, I believe it's been mindfulness or meditation and well-being and happiness.
Okay, now that's not to say that...
That's garbage if it's not pre-registered.
But again, it's a safeguard.
It's a guardrail.
Being like, okay, I'm more willing to trust this kind of study if it is pre-registered.
And it's important because actually at one point I had a little argument with a mindfulness researcher who was defensive about some of the things I was saying on Twitter.
And then I was kind of pushing back by trying to be kind, which is hard for me on Twitter.
I said, does there exist?
Is there any pre-registered studies?
This is not a study on well-being.
It was actually done.
A study sponsored by the Department of Defense in the U.S. looking at mindfulness training among military people, which again shows you how far this has gone and how warped it is to some extent.
And it was pre-registered.
I'm like, oh, cool.
I thought this was great.
I went to the pre-registration and what they pre-registered and what they did are night and day.
Okay, so I know now that it's signed it because it's pre-registered, but just because you've pre-registered something doesn't mean you followed it to the T. And this is a case where the results were really messy and mixed and they didn't report all the things they even measured.
So all this stuff is like all these little hints of like, maybe it makes you feel good, maybe.
But, you know, I like smoking cannabis, it makes me feel good, I'll do that instead.
Yeah, I mean, just to...
To reiterate the point I made before, I mean, these things can be distracting from the results that are robust and strong, like exercise.
So it's pretty easy to uncover strong effects.
You just can notice them.
It's not, it shouldn't be that hard.
So yeah, a bit of culling, a bit more skepticism.
It's not just good for not believing or not promoting something that's false or unproven, but also good for focusing people's attention.
On the stuff that we do know, we can maybe stay on message.
Psychologists aren't going to give people the meaning of life and tell them the secrets to being a happy person.
Jordan Peterson.
Yeah.
Sorry, scientific psychologists.
But yeah, we could definitely, we could tell them three or four things that are definitely true, I'm sure.
And that's better than nothing.
Yeah.
Since we've been quite cruel to the mindfulness practitioners and researchers, I'll grant Matt also the bone that I think that The emphasis on a middle path within traditional Buddhism,
as well as introspection in general, that you don't need to go into the extreme ascetic and you don't need to go into extreme hedonism.
I like that.
The moderate, the centrist, that's the correct golden mean path to follow.
And I think that is cooler than messages in...
I actually have a question maybe for Chris or Matt.
So I know you had your little kind of back and forth argument with Sam Harris about that one, I guess, emergency podcast about he's saying how you all need to meditate because if you do, you'll realize there's no self and also you'll come to these particular political views, which of course is nonsense.
But I want to just ask about one piece of that.
And it's one that I just don't know.
I'm not sure I stand.
And that is this idea that if you sit long enough, and maybe longer than I did, just an hour a day, but actually go on retreats, maybe even be alone for a long time, do you believe that doing this will automatically, without anything else, lead to some falling apart of the self?
Some realization that the self is an illusion, and that there's nothing really holding me together?
Is that a natural byproduct of this sort of introspection?
Alternatively, is it a product of that practice, plus the Dharma, the teaching, that that is what might happen?
Yeah, I do have thoughts on this.
And I think I fall in line with Evan Thompson and others who emphasize that there's a lot of lifting done by the conceptual framework that you're introduced to in meditation.
And if you took people and just give them the basic introduction to...
Meditation and didn't tell them anything else.
I think you would not see all of the things that someone like Sam Harris might claim are just the natural process.
But the part that I would agree with him on, and I think most people who've meditated for any amount of time would agree on, is that if you start a meditational practice, you become aware of how unruly.
Your mind is, how often it's projecting into the future, looking at the past or how hard it is to exist in the moment and how hard it can be not to make your mind go off running on tangents and that kind of thing.
Just focusing on that activity is very difficult.
And I think for a lot of people, that idea was for me as well.
It's like quite revealing.
About the processes of how your mind is working in daily life, that if you don't take the time to do that, that you might not notice.
Now, the second part of that, so does that lead to the awareness that the self is an illusion and that there is nothing inherently there?
I'm much more skeptical about because I think the notion that we have an autobiographical self concept, which is actually very important to how humans function in the world.
And yes, it depends on how you frame something as an illusion, because sure.
I think that...
If you look at people who have Alzheimer's or who get brain damage and the impact that the destruction of a personal identity and a loss of memories can have on an individual, it's really clear that people then say this person has lost what they were,
right?
And it's very hard for the other people in their lives.
Now, if that person as well, when it's happening to them during the process, They're often very distressed about what's happening, right?
They don't want to lose it.
But once they've lost the ability in the individual moments, they can be fine because they don't have an awareness.
But like, I think most people, if you said, do you want to recognize your daughter or your grandchildren?
They regard it as a fundamental loss.
And I think this notion that people have about the destruction and illusion of self, it doesn't recognize the importance of that cognitive component that we have.
The story of an autobiographical self.
And I think becoming aware of how you construct that through meditation is interesting, but I think it's a fundamental component of being human that we do have a sense of an autobiographical self.
So that's my extreme take on it.
I think it's an illusion in the same sense that the way we process vision is an illusion.
I have a take on that too, which is I think you can get to that point.
That understanding, at least intellectually, without doing any meditation at all.
I think I find it maybe a little bit easier because I've got a terrible autobiographical memory and I'm usually just drifting around in a haze and not really knowing what's going on.
But most people are aware that you're a different person when you're at work and when you're at home in bed or playing with your children.
And at different times in your life, you've been different people.
And if you've ever taken...
Certain kinds of drugs, you'll know that you can be a different person again.
And I think if people are honest with themselves, they don't really think that there is like this ineffable self, like a kernel of a crystal somewhere that's sitting inside you, which expresses itself differently.
I think it's layers of an onion skin.
So you can figure that out.
I mean, but they'll say, I know you have to feel it.
You have to truly, which I would say, I don't know what that means.
Nicky, I'm sorry, and I promise I'll let you respond after this, but I just want to mention that there was a cross-cultural psychology conference that I was at, and I've seen some debates also in the literature about the self-concept in East Asia versus the self-concept in the West,
right?
I'm familiar with this research looking about the way that particularly Japanese people use social media versus participants in North America and Europe, right?
There was this difference in the results when you look cross-culturally, that Japanese people tended to regard it, that basically there is no fundamental self, that there is a situational self, which depends on the context of what you show.
So, you know, what you do when your boss is watching is different than when you're with your friend.
And they were talking about social media usage, having to navigate that, right?
That you have to present all these different types of selves and this being completely in line.
With their self-concept and the self-concept in Japan, which is very much contextual.
Even the language reflects that, right?
That the hierarchy changes the verbs that you use when you're talking to someone.
So you always are aware of positional relationships.
But the American respondents tended to regard people modulating their opinions on social media networks in order to not cause trouble with like employment or so on.
Denying the true self because they were representing themselves differently towards different people and sometimes like putting their opinion down.
That struck me as if you construct a view of psychology or introspective practices based on the default being the Western North American perspectives, that it will result in you having a very skewed, very culturally specific interpretation.
of like what the self is, it just struck me that's relevant.
I'm sorry, we're not letting Miki talk, but I just want to say I agree with you there, Chris.
I think that's kind of what I was saying, that a lot of what we're referring to when we talk about the self and so on is not talking about a fundamental psychological thing, but it's like a cultural construct that for Westerners is a hot-button issue and just happens to fit nicely with some Eastern religions as well.
What about you, Mickey?
What about you, Mickey?
Come on.
You say something now.
Well, my take, I'm skeptical that without some extra cultural, actual teaching that the self is an illusion, that you will get there naturally no matter how long you meditate.
I could be wrong about that because I haven't done these extreme forms of meditation.
But it reminds me of this, I guess, a common occurrence for, I've never done this, but people who take this drug called ayahuasca.
It's a cactus in Peru, I believe.
In South America, more generally.
And apparently, a common experience, a common visual hallucination you might experience is the vision of a jaguar.
And everyone, you know, waits to see this vision of a jaguar.
And then I'm like, is there something about the drug that leads to a vision of a jaguar?
Really?
Or is it that you're in South America where there are jaguars and maybe the shaman talks about jaguars and they have some sort of mythical, you know, power or what have you that leads you and then you're taught about it and that's what you see.
So it struck me there might be a similarity there going on.
So I just kind of push against that notion that you automatically are going to have this revelation.
Only if you meditate the right way will you get there.
But again, maybe I haven't done it the right way and I've got to get on waking up.
Just a quick shout out on that topic of Ayahuasca.
A very nice podcast, what's it called?
Oh No, Ross and Carrie.
They do great stuff, but they went down.
One of them, Ross, went down to do an Ayahuasca experience.
And he had a very, very bad trip.
It's probably worth listening to because he probably experienced, it's probably evidence for the existence of a self-concept because he completely lost it and felt that he didn't exist and was maybe dead.
And it was a terrifying, terrifying thing, but a great episode to catch.
Look, Ricky and Matt, you're experienced psychonauts, so dissociative experiences can be transcendent, but they can also be...
Freaking scary, right?
Like, I want to get back to normal.
That's for sure.
Yeah, bad trips exist by them.
They do.
Mickey, we've taken up a lot of your evening, but I'd be remiss if we didn't ask you, since we've trapped you here for the time being.
So, you know, we cover gurus and focus on the secular variety.
And you and your co-host, you all, I think, are people that have been active.
In the Heterodox Academy, Jonathan Haidt kind of space, right?
With concerns about political influence on particularly the psychology discipline.
And I think many of the concerns are valid because there's a huge queue in that direction.
But I'm wondering with COVID and with the trajectory that the heterodox sphere has taken, I think it's taken a lot of blows.
Definitely.
I wonder how you currently Feel about that whole space and the discourse in general around heterodoxy versus wokeism and not necessarily in academic psychology terms, but you can talk about that.
Just in general, how are you feeling as a heterodox inclined person?
Right.
Maybe clarify a little bit.
So I'm a member of Heterodox Academy, but I put my name on our website and that's essentially my involvement.
I get their newsletter, which I think I've looked at a couple of times really only.
Not because I have anything against it, just I've hit a lot of emails, so I just don't look at them all.
So I think your reading of what's been happening in the heterotic space is correct, and I think there's a few reasons why.
COVID, but I think the bigger one is this kind of what we're calling the racial reckoning, that post-George Floyd world.
And that has led, I'm not sure how you've experienced it, you too have experienced it in Japan and Australia, but in North America, I mean, it was a sweeping change.
Within weeks of that event, there were demands, letters, statements, and even though we're somewhat removed in Canada, I mean, some of my colleagues forget that we're a different country, but we have a different population, we have different demographics,
for example, but nonetheless, we experienced it deeply here.
And it's become difficult for any other voices to speak out about other issues or even to disagree with, let's say, some of the things that are happening as a result of the reaction to the George Floyd incident.
So I've had, you know, there have been, in my department, we've had equity hires, which were, I think, all of us were, well, not all of us, but more or less were on board to hire people to, again, to the faculty look like our students, look like the population.
There have been, you know, now there is in my department, for example, they're asking us to reflect on what we've done personally for diversity, diversity issues.
And it took me a while.
I actually pushed back being like, hey, in an earlier part of my career, I studied intergroup relations and prejudice and stigma.
So I'm on board with diversity mandates.
I taught and I created and taught a class in psychology of prejudice for like nearly 15 years.
So I'm on board with these things, but I'm not necessarily on board with being coerced to write these statements.
That are almost like, you know, these struggle sessions, right?
Like where you're forced to like say what you're doing.
So I kind of pushed back, but for me even to push back, I'm a full professor and nothing's going to happen.
Nothing bad will happen to me.
It took me a long time to speak up.
And I remember like, I'm meeting my microphone and being like, oh man, am I going to do it?
Am I just going to say, I'm not sure I agree with this.
It took me a while.
So I'm not trying to say that I'm self-censoring or, you know, there's no freedom of speech.
I know that's kind of overblown, but I also don't think it's incorrect.
That there is a bit of social censure about certain topics.
And certain topics are often out of bounds.
And it saddens me that that's the case.
I think sometimes it's good that they're out of bounds.
I mean, like, I am not a free speech absolute at all.
I think that's a silly notion, that we can just say whatever we want without any consequences.
I think there ought to be consequences if there are a certain kind of speech.
But we have to be, that bar needs to be really high.
For someone to just express, you know, disagreement with something and to be worried about how they'll be perceived, I think that's...
That's not a healthy environment.
So again, I think since George Floyd, because so many people want this massive change, and I think for mostly the right reasons, it's been harder, like these kind of more heterodox kinds of organizations and people, I suspect, are having a harder time gaining support.
I was probably, and this is a good illustration of the difference, like the thing that you're thinking about is really Heterodox Academy on kind of that wing of the heterodox sphere.
And I was thinking a little more of the insane way of it that became COVID contrarians and that we cover on the Gurusphere.
But I think that in so doing, you're highlighting an important distinction, which is that I think there is a very important difference between a figure like Steven Pinker or Jonathan Haidt or you and a figure like Brett Weinstein or Dave Rubin or the Gad Saad.
And they all get lumped into The heterodox, right, as a category.
And I think that is something sometimes people think I'm being guilty of, but in my head, the distinctions are always clear, but maybe not in my tweets.
And I agree with you that I find myself frustrated that there are a lot of efforts which seem to ring the bell for equity in terms of the superficial presentation.
That they're helping to achieve that.
And this would include things like diversity statements and so on.
But the actual practice of a lot of these things is extremely bureaucratic.
And actually, most people involved with it are aware that it's bureaucratic, right?
Diversity statements, the way that people write them on their application forms or whatever, there's a standard format.
And it isn't to say that people The fact that it has become relevant to hiring is necessarily bad.
But I think the people who push back and say, well, there's no clear evidence that it actually impacts anything except for becoming a box ticking exercise, that people who have the appropriate background and training.
That are from middle class or more wealthy backgrounds and know how to say the right things can jump through that hurdle easier than, say, somebody from a working class background or somebody from an immigrant background.
That's true.
And I do worry that when criticism of those kinds of activities tends to be regarded very suspiciously because it is true that people who make those criticisms Are often also your Brett Weinsteins and so on as well.
But it would be a shame if any pushback becomes conflated into that category.
Yeah, so there's a few things in there.
First thing I must say, I just ignore, unlike you two, I ignore the crazy wing.
I'm not sure I even call them heterodox thinkers.
I just call them crazy people.
And you've highlighted so well the sheer lunacy of the Weinsteins.
I lost every ounce of sympathy.
And maybe because of you two, you know, especially for, well, actually for both of them, they're both so horrible.
But I stopped paying attention a long time ago.
The only time I ever hear about them is through you two.
And so I ignore them.
But I definitely take exception to, for example, Jonathan Haidt or Steven Pinker being lumped in with them.
Like some people, I heard a colleague of mine, a friend of mine call Jonathan Haidt an alt-right figure.
I'm like, an alt-right figure?
I'm not even sure he's conservative.
And if you're not with me, you're just in this box of otherness.
And to me, that is distressing.
I think that's a breakdown in just regular conversation.
So I think one should ignore the crazies.
You guys are too smart to be talking about all those people, right?
I mean, it's entertainment, so don't get me wrong.
I enjoy hearing it.
The pushback I'd have to that, Michelo, I think overall, I agree with you that it's mentally better for people to...
Ignore what a lot of the people that we cover up to.
Like, nobody needs to be listening to JP Sears content.
But the problem is that lots of people are.
And that to me is something that there's a lot of the people that we cover.
And, you know, it's interesting academically and whatnot to look at the rhetorical techniques.
But there are also things where these people have huge audiences and they end up showing up.
In places that you wouldn't expect, like on government panels or on talk shows talking about the coronavirus or so on.
And so I think there is an element where I don't think that everybody needs to pay attention to what Alex Jones is doing.
But the fact that there are people who are looking at his content and looking at the stuff that he's pointing out or that he's advancing week in and week out, it's a good thing.
Yeah, fair enough.
I mean, you guys are doing a public service for sure.
No, no, not us.
I'm really...
I was thinking of Knowledge Fight.
The guys who listen to like four hours of Alex's jokes a day, they do that.
But I think, you know, Matt and me do this because it is fun as well.
It is entertainment.
Like, we're not moral crusaders out to save the world.
We enjoy taking apart the content, but I think that there are some times where...
It does feel like the Weinsteins and whatnot, it's an indulgence to go into their wacky conspiracies, but they end up being repeated by so many people that it's just like, yeah, they're a bellweller in some respects.
No, but, you know, in line with what Mickey said, I mean, this was crossing my mind as we were editing the last episode with James Lindsay.
Not with Jim's Nancy, on Jim's Nancy.
Yeah, we spent many hours with him.
And it gets to a point where it becomes a little bit unfun because it's transparently crazy talk.
And one can dunk on it till the cows come home or laugh at it or point out how it's gateways to fascism and so on.
And all of that stuff may well be true, but it just becomes less interesting.
I think we're gravitating more towards...
Figures that occupy a more interesting zone, which are not obviously crazy or wrong or stupid, but they're either intentionally or not indulging in some rhetorical tricks that are kind of worth squirreling out.
That's kind of a fun puzzle for me.
Yeah.
Well, so again, I think it was Liam who recommended you...
Is it Connor Friesdorf?
He's not fond of him.
Yeah, I could tell.
And I must admit, I've read a few of his articles.
I mostly found them to be fine.
But I'm wondering what the critique says.
I would be really interested in hearing a breakdown of his oeuvre.
I was just going to say, I think we're moving in that direction.
And in line with that, we'll be covering some more people on the left.
And it's a whole other conversation.
But it is interesting how they are sort of intrinsically more challenging.
Because to the extent that they are, in our opinion, being nonsensical, it's kind of an institutional orthodoxy or an academic theoretical orthodoxy that it is based on rather than a heterodox,
glyconoclastic kind of thing.
So that'll be a challenge.
We'll see how we go with that.
But before we leave the culture war stuff, I'll say my piece about...
That and the excesses of lochism, which is that Chris and I are like self-nominated neoliberals, right?
But I think the socialists and the materialist communists have a good take there, which is that when they see this kind of window dressing, this performative stuff being done by the middle class,
essentially, which is a way of justifying their moral superiority.
And they look at it with a very sceptical eye, and I think they're on point there.
I think there is a good component of that that we should watch out for.
I mean, to me, an interesting analogy, which probably most people would think is a stretch, is between the Victorian English middle class, this historical culture that was in England around the time of the Empire, and there was a very strong cultural set of norms there.
Completely arbitrary in many cases about, yeah, sure, what school you went to and how you spoke, but the kind of opinions and the kind of things you said and did and didn't do that showed that you were sound, yeah?
A sound chap, right?
Who could be trusted to run some bit of the East India Company or something.
And their bureaucracy was based on that.
And they had a total lack of self-awareness that it was this grand filtering mechanism.
And a moral justification for their own role in running a large portion of the world.
And it can be a danger, I think, for fashionable academics and people in HR departments and people at the upper end of town, highly educated, you know, use these topics as a way to do essentially exactly that.
Bit of a hot take, but...
There's an analogy, Miki, that I thought of.
That relates specifically to psychology and the double standards that I've seen around these social justice topics.
So in social psychology, there is generally a skew towards advocacy for social justice and those kind of topics being put front and center, right?
And I would say amongst early career researchers, this is becoming a dominant theme.
And I've seen this.
It seemed to play out in anthropology in the 70s and the 90s.
It's an interesting parallel to just see it all happening again.
But I remember noticing that whenever people were talking about Turkers, mechanical Turks, or the people that are taking part in any of the online crowdsourcing things,
there was a real palpable disdain.
For them as almost not real people, not real subjects and incredibly low quality, just it reflected in this like concern that they were all bots at one point, right?
There was the bot crisis of whatever, 2019 or whenever it was.
And that to me was hugely overblown because what you had was some low quality data, but in large part, a lot of the low quality data that you saw.
Came from studies that were playing peanuts to people.
And then we're surprised to find that you'll get some percentage of data that isn't good.
And yes, there are some things where there are forms for completing things on crowdsourcing platforms.
But by and large, those are not bots.
Because the whole point of those platforms is that they're designed for tasks that bots cannot do, right?
That's the HIT in Amazon Turk terms was human intelligence task.
Because the bots can't do it.
And you can defeat most bots with just a capture, right?
Ask it, is this a bike?
Or what animal is in the picture?
Or, you know, so on.
So in those respects, I saw a lot of people who might even that day have been given a talk about the importance of looking outside weird samples and having better representation in the discipline and being concerned about social justice issues.
And then casually disparage.
Workers on crowdsourcing platforms.
And most of the times, it's not for me, I'm not saying that we shouldn't criticize the over-reliance on those samples, but Roller, the criticism should be directed at the researchers and the people not paying reasonable amounts or not instituting reasonable quality checks.
I've seen lots of people recommend you give a quality check and you just kick out the people that feel.
And I was like, that's incredibly harsh because Maybe to just be able to attention check.
My preference to that is that you pay the people who do the survey, regardless of the quality of the data, because you cannot say in a lab setting, well, you did the study, but you didn't do it well enough, so we're not going to pay you.
And I just saw that double standard so often that the focus on whatever is the social justice topic that has recognition, which is associated with a political movement.
Gets attention.
But the ones which are maybe more impactful about just paying participants reasonable wages, treating people online as if they are just people that are online, are less sexy, less interesting.
There's not huge panels on them.
So I know that's not everyone, but that struck me once as this very clear double standard in the conferences and what the concern with social justice looked like.
Yeah, that's very interesting.
I mean, it just shows you that people follow the incentives, right?
So you get the incentive, you get the points for whatever topic or way you're discussing, but that other stuff, the actual stuff that's actually going to impact a real human being on the other side, or many human beings on the other side, is not visible and not the incentive there to do it that way.
I'm sure that's true, and I'm sure there's some people that do this, but maybe I'm an optimist, and I think generally people try to be good.
And, you know, we're all hypocrites a little bit.
Yeah, I don't have this as a holier-than-value thing, except to say that, you know, if you are casting stones, you should be more careful of your own behavior.
Clean your room, Chris.
Yeah, I'm inclined.
There was an example of a project that I was involved with, where there was a desire to collect diverse data set, right?
Like, not rely on...
College-age graduates and whatnot, but they want not to pay people.
They want it to be volunteer for various reasons.
And I was thinking like, okay, but the easiest way, the win-win for everyone is actually just pay people.
Just pay people and actually crowdsourcing platforms, particularly in Japan, where this project was going to be based.
The majority of the people using the crowdsourcing platforms are housewives.
A sample which is otherwise difficult to reach for people who might be collecting samples from universities.
So to me, it was like this project, it wanted to pay a large amount of money to a researcher in order to arrange these volunteer efforts to ensure a diverse and underrepresented sample.
What they should have done is hire someone that can use crowdsourcing platforms, pay the people on the crowdsourcing platforms a reasonable amount.
And they would contribute the data and everybody would win.
But because there was this emphasis that it has to be volunteer and underrepresented populations, we don't want to use online platforms.
It got in the way of the actual goal.
So yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
I've actually struck that too, Chris, where the ethics board came back and we said we can't pay people that much because the person might be economically disadvantaged.
And because there was such a large amount of money on offer, they might feel compelled to participate.
That's what your ethics board said?
What kind of ethics board do you have?
I've had the opposite.
But you can see the logic.
It's the same logic though.
Oh yeah, you can get the opposite too.
I've had the opposite where I was...
You were trying to pay slave labor.
Not slave labor.
We got a study where I was going to pay $30 for...
It was a long, logical study.
Many instances.
But my ROB was like, no, man, you gotta be like 50. I'm like, 50?
Wow.
I mean, I did.
I am.
It's a good illustration of the diversity of review board.
Yeah, definitely.
Oh, damn master students!
Yeah, so this is inside our baseball academic complaints as well.
But as it relates to the guru sphere and the kind of people we cover, my takeaway from it would be that a version of responsible.
Heterodoxy or a willingness to go against whatever the kind of dominant trend is valuable in a lot of disciplines.
And even though those people can be extremely annoying, like Lee Jusom, for example, I think it's good to have them in the field.
And that can be the value of heterodoxy that is sometimes overlooked when we, for example, focus on people like Brett Weinstein.
Right.
I was thinking this the other day, but I used to have a blog.
I don't really write it anymore, but every once in a while, I get an idea.
I get lots of ideas for things I never write, but one was on the benefits of being disagreeable and how we need disagreeable people.
Not many of them, mind you, just a few.
Preach.
Yeah, in our organizations.
I really do think it's important.
It's important you have people who can say no and can explain why and are willing to argue with you a little bit.
Now, again, it's not always pleasant.
Lee Jussam, we had him on our show, and he's actually a very different person than online, as most people are.
But I really don't like his Twitter presence, and I don't follow him because I just find it annoying.
And he occasionally will, like, at me.
But I'm glad that he's around.
I'm glad that he's stirring the pot, even if I don't agree with everything he says.
Even if sometimes I feel he goes over the line.
I think you need, Chris, I sense a strong disagreeableness in you.
What?
What?
Yeah, Chris.
Look, I agree with those sentiments, too.
And one final nuance, though, is that I think that heterodoxy has been defined too much in terms of political orientation.
There's lots and lots of different ways to be heterodox.
And the name that always pops into my head is Peter Singer.
And he's like a classic.
You know, this ethicist who talks about the ethical grounds for killing babies or whatever.
It's the ultimate example of you can't say that.
That's wrong.
You cannot talk about that.
But I do think it's valuable.
I think that, of course, the danger is perhaps the degree to which purely academic discussions, right?
And that's how I read Peter Singer, as philosophical, like him basically putting out a very disagreeable view that most people would find abhorrent.
And saying, well, prove where my logic is wrong, right?
And then that will spark beneficial things.
Of course, the danger is that the universities and university discourse is totally open to the world now.
And I guess when the public consumes the stuff, not so much in Peter Singer's case, but in other cases, you see it with the race and IQ stuff, for instance.
Seems like bullshit.
I mean, the academic material is intrinsically bullshit, but then it then gets weaponized even further in the public sphere.
Yeah, I think the world is a better place.
We're in a better position because there's a guy like Peter Singer around who's kind of pushing the ethical boundaries of things and asking questions and leading us to think maybe a little bit differently.
And I find it upsetting when actual academics are doing honest work.
By honest work, I mean they believe in it.
They think it's true and they're not trying to pull the wool over someone's eyes.
And for whatever reason, it falls afoul of whatever current orthodoxy might be.
So one that rings to mind is, and this is controversial, but a number of years ago now, I think her name was Rebecca Tuvel, wrote an article in Hepatia, a feminist philosophy journal, making an argument about the nature of trans identity and suggesting that trans identity is simply like a choice or,
you know, what you identify as.
And it's not that it's not tied to sex or anything biological, that then that opens the door to other trans sorts of identities.
And she's the example of transracialism.
And there's a famous case of, I'm forgetting her name now.
Rachel Dolezal.
Yeah, Rachel Dolezal, who was the head of the NAACP in the U.S. And she's white, but she's acted black and would have a spray on tan and a fake Afro or whatever.
So, you know, most people find her behavior abhorrent, but it seems like she does identify as a black person.
I don't want to take her too seriously, but my broader point is that Tuval's argument was a logical one.
You might find it distasteful, you might disagree, but I find that it's a loss.
It's a real loss when something like that is taken away.
And that's no longer, we're not even allowed to talk about that anymore.
Meanwhile, I remember, it's hilarious.
I've got two children, one's 13, one's 10, and they're learning a lot about trying to identity in school, what have you.
And I was pushing a little bit.
And then, you know, because they have friends now, many friends, or not many, but a few, who are identified as trans.
And then I just, I asked them the question about, gave an example, what if I want to say I identify as a different race?
How would you feel about that?
So her argument came in handy there to just kind of push their intuitions a little bit.
I think the rage campaigns that can rage around people can definitely take that That tenor, right?
That they become just that...
And even in the cases where people say, well, there were legitimate issues and the paper should have been retracted.
But there's a very clear social signal sent about the next person that wants to write a paper like that, right?
And then, Matt, you identified the issue which cuts on the other side, which is when we're talking about it's good to have people that are willing to do controversial work and push the envelope and stuff.
But the recent IQ...
Side of things also shows that you have these people who...
Limits.
Yeah, who will do that.
But they clearly are, in many occasions, like, just so happens that they also have a lot of political views about restricting immigration from non-white countries and so on, right?
And I think that it ends up messy because you don't want to ignore that that exists and that people use the mantle.
Of like, well, I'm just talking about controversial topics and stuff and I'm being silenced in the same way in order to advance things which are not good science and which are like politically violenced agendas.
And we're at the same time as you want to allow for contrarian points of view and discourse around difficult topics.
So like it ends up being a difficult thing to walk.
And I think that the Heterodox fear, broadly speaking, Qulet and whatnot, definitely fell towards the credulous side in dealing with any case where somebody said, I've been silenced.
This topic can't be touched, right?
Their take was always huge sympathy.
But on the other side, the social justice one can very much veer towards the, well, you got to crack a few omelets to make an egg, right?
And I understand that.
But if you're the egg that gets cracked.
I think you have a very different view about that.
And yeah, I'm not saying that Matt, you or Nikki or me have the right answers to that, but just that I understand why it's a fraught area, but I think, I feel shitty saying this, but like having nuance is an undervalued stance in that area.
And I know that's weaponized, so it makes me cringe even saying that, but I still think it is important.
Yeah, you pick up a really good point.
I mean, this goes back to my point earlier about free speech.
I'm not being a free speech absolutist.
I think there are topics that are off-bound, but can I give you a rule about what those topics are?
No, I can't.
So it ends up being really difficult to determine.
So why is the race and IQ stuff out of bounds, which I mostly agree with.
But in my opinion, at least, the 2BAL stuff isn't.
I don't have a good answer.
I think if you're trans, you view the Tubal article as threatening to your identity and maybe dangerous.
Yeah, so these are cases of people's convictions, political or moral or whatever, impinging.
And it's relative, isn't it?
People's perceptions of what's inside and outside the acceptable boundaries.
I mean, I have my own little cute example of this, by the way.
It's not culture worry, but I think it's still the same kind of thing, which is that I work on addiction and gambling and the impact of gambling on Health, wellbeing and happiness, essentially.
And there's kind of two camps in this field.
There's like a public health, social justice, we should ban gambling, very high government involvement.
Then there's the kind of more industry positive, people are free to choose to do whatever they like and self-responsibility kind of model, right?
So I'm strong, my findings, I've sort of been unintentionally strongly aligned with the activist.
Kind of side, right?
Gambling very bad.
This is all the bad things that the problems with gambling cause.
And then in a relatively minor cross-sectional paper, where we were measuring the effect of different levels from people that didn't gamble at all, people that were like what we call recreational gamblers, people gambling without problems, various levels of gambling problems.
And we just looked at their happiness and their wellbeing.
And as expected, as gambling problems increase, of course, your wellbeing goes down.
But we had this really surprising counter-narrative finding, which was that gamblers are a lot happier than people that don't gamble at all.
And I suspect you'd find something similar in the alcohol research, maybe.
People who drink alcohol occasionally are happier than people that are teetotalers.
So, you know, I was...
More fun.
Yes, we tried to control.
I mean, I thought it was due to just more happy people.
The line of causality was the other direction, right?
People that were more hedonic.
Maybe younger, had the freedom, the resources to go out there and do this stuff, we'd be happier.
We tried to control for everything, and it's still, the effects still remain.
My point is, of course, I enjoyed that.
Like, I enjoyed that result.
It was counter-narrative.
It wasn't what we expected.
I was very happy to publish it.
But I think I did notice that a lot of my colleagues sort of in the anti-gambling camp just quietly and politely ignored that, not talked about.
Anyway, it's not a cultural thing, just a little example of the sociology, I guess, that's at play in research.
The selectivity of support or lack thereof, depending on your priors.
I think it's very hard to escape, but I think we all do that.
We should try hard not to, but we shouldn't fool ourselves to think that we don't do that all the time.
Yeah, so Mickey, you've been extremely generous with your time, and it's been a pleasure to discuss everything.
With you.
And this is a case where, you know, I heard you in my ears for years with the Two Psychologists for Beers podcast.
And then now having the parasocial bubble pierced by meeting you.
But I mean, in a good way.
Not that my golden image was crushed.
So I hardly recommend that anyone who is interested in the kind of topics that we touched on, that they go and look at the podcast.
You have a lot of episodes going back a number of years that I think still really hold up.
So I know that you retired from the podcast, but it's still going with Joel Limbar and Alexa.
Yeah, Alexa Tullet.
Alexa Tullet now.
So I recommend it to anyone.
And is there anything else that you want the pimp recommend?
Should people follow you on Twitter?
No, don't follow me on Twitter.
I am essentially almost off Twitter.
I've so restricted the time of usage.
For many years, I struggled with it, but I just put on these little locks on my phone, on my computer, and I have such restricted access.
And then I also do the thing that anytime anyone annoyed me on Twitter, I would unfollow them.
And now my Twitter feed, I'm...
I'm also in a hard labor on, and it's incredibly boring.
It really is dull.
It's like job announcements, new papers.
It's like no culture war stuff.
Every once in a while, if I'm feeling masochistic, I'll follow you, Chris.
I'll see what you're doing.
Yeah, just periodically unfollow and follow me.
That's the way to indulge with the culture war.
Okay, Mikki, so it sounds like you're going to be focusing on your actual academic real work instead of faffing about on social media like us.
Yeah.
I'm in a weird place.
I don't have nothing to pimp.
No, you do.
You're a Google Scholar.
Check out Vicky's Google Scholar.
It's very impressive.
It's very impressive.
Big swinging H-index.
It's nice.
There's stuff on mindfulness, there's stuff on ego depletion, and there's pre-registered studies, like all the things we've talked about.
And you are ridiculously productive academically, Vicky.
It's very annoying hearing you on the podcast swanning off.
The sabbaticals and exotic locales and then publishing a bunch of papers.
Very annoying.
I don't know if you realize that.
I'm trying really hard to correct that.
So we'll see if I can slow down.
Yeah, but thank you for coming on and informing us on the replication crisis and everything else that you did and for the podcast.
Yeah, well, thanks so much for having me on.
And also, it's a thrill for me to be on.
I'm not going to lie.
You guys, both of you, have been in my years for...
Is it a...
A couple of years now?
A year and a half, maybe?
A year and a half.
Anyway, so you're definitely up there in my podcast queue.
So thanks for having me on.
It's been lots of fun.
Oh, and one last thing, Mickey, as well, is that you were one of the first people when we were starting the podcast that we asked a whole bunch of advice for.
I forgot that.
We're our podcasting Jordan Peterson.
So you deserve the credit.
I think this is your baby and your responsibility for all our hard takes.
Excellent.
Well, I'm happy that the teacher has become the student because you guys are doing such an excellent job and far surpassed anything we've done.
So it's awesome.
I'll be sure.
All right.
Thanks, mate.
Catch you soon.
All right.
See ya.
Goodbye, Mickey.
Auf Wiedersehen.
Sayonara.
Tschüss.
I went back for German.
Au revoir!
Yeah.
What's the traditional Australian goodbye?
See you when your legs are straighter?
Okay.
No, I don't know what the Australian is.
That's it.
It's in canon now.
See you when your legs are straighter.
Okay.
Okay.
That's terrible.
Sorry, when I'm saying goodbye to you.
See you when your legs are straighter.
See, the thing is, Chris, I've learned from watching Joe Rogan's podcast is that you can say absolutely anything about Australia and people will believe you.
Especially Brett Weinstein.
Yep, yep, that's pretty true.
You're barely a real country anyway, so it's what people imagine is happening there.
Who can say, Matt, that it isn't what is actually happening?
It could be a penal colony, or you might be living in a tropical paradise, as Home and Away and Neighbours taught me as a child.
Home and Away and Neighbours are pretty accurate, actually.
That's a pretty fair summary of what life is like here.
There was a Northern Irish character.
Came in to, I think, neighbours called Connor, and he was a car thief.
Was he a backpacker?
Because in my experience, you guys were all backpackers here.
Maybe he was a backpacking car thief.
I don't know how he got to Australia.
I don't remember the storyline, but I do remember being flummoxed by somebody with a Northern Irish accent appearing on that show.
It broke the view that it was just an alternate reality where you couldn't actually reach it.
Universe.
Yeah.
No, you can reach it, Chris.
You can come here.
That would be wild for you, wouldn't it?
Just be in Australian suburbia or a little coastal town, not too dissimilar from where I live.
Like, we have a caravan park down the road.
I know about caravan parks.
I've been in a caravan park many times.
It's not exotic for me.
Maybe a caravan park on the beach.
But, you know, Japan is pretty nice.
The weather is nice.
It has beautiful scenery.
Don't worry, Matt.
I've seen things.
I've seen things.
It's exotic over there too, I suppose.
Yeah.
Well, so now, Matt, the important things.
After Mickey kindly helped us sort out the state of psychology, we now need to sort out the state of our reviews with our review of reviews.
Getting closer.
Getting closer.
What state are our reviews in?
Ship shape, tip top.
Pretty, pretty good this week.
We've had a run of five-star reviews, which is good.
That's what people should be doing.
I've got two positive ones, and then I'm going to get to the negative one.
The positive ones are quite short.
That's why I'm putting two in.
Not for indulgence, Matt, just I think it's important to keep things balanced.
So there's a five-star one that says, Simply Awful.
That's the title.
The way Chris constantly says, Yeah.
And the way Matt says anything and something will make you die a little bit inside every time you listen.
The actual content is still pretty good, though, and they never miss an episode.
And that's from Irish Tong.
Well, that's nice, I think.
Say something.
Wait.
Matt, say something.
Something.
Thuh.
Thuh.
Something.
Well, they say you say something.
I don't say something.
Something.
But that's not true.
That's a damn lie.
No, no, no.
There's a confusion here.
I cannot pronounce the T-H.
That's not what they've written.
They have written the T-H and they've done the ending with instead of a G, a K. So you say something.
I say something.
Yeah.
Do I?
Maybe.
I haven't noticed.
Okay.
But that was confusing hearing you reading their… Yeah, I understand.
A phonetic spelling of my accent.
I'm still struggling to decouple it.
I should have thought that one out.
We should just let it go.
My own mispronunciation issues.
That was bad.
I was like, God damn, that sounds like Chris.
That's not me.
Moving swiftly on to this important one.
The title is Let Chris Talk!
And it says...
Let Chris talk.
Let Chris talk.
I say it half in jest.
Love you guys.
Great show.
Keep up the good work.
That's from Noodles115.
So, thank you, Noodles.
Half in jest.
Half in jest.
Yeah.
Noodles.
That was going well until you said half in jest.
That should have been fully.
Let me speak, Matt.
Let me say something.
Full satire.
God sick.
That was gad, sad level satire there.
I approve.
Sledgehammer satire.
But he tempered it.
He should never do that.
Well.
After that ringing endorsement, the two of them, ringing endorsements, I will now turn to the negative review, which is called, the title is Gaslighting Anti-Vax Shills.
And it's one star.
And it says, someone recommended I listen to this podcast because supposedly they break down myths and stuff with a scientific basis.
But I listened.
And all I heard was a bunch of anti-vax nonsense and and justification of why Joe Rogan is actually good for society.
I think this is some gaslighting nonsense.
This is from RaiRai12000.
What?
Now, that's confusing, Matt.
Chris.
Do you know what's happened?
Anti-vax nonsense.
No, I don't.
Let me see if I can Sherlock this shit for you.
So, we are not...
Pro-antivax people.
What?
Wait, pro-antivax?
Yeah, we're not.
We are not antivax people.
We are not pro-antivax people.
I was correct.
We are not in fever of people who are antivax, see?
Okay.
Stay with me, old man.
Technically.
Stay with me.
But we do know someone who has recently been on our show making arguments about, well, you know.
Aren't there problems with the way that public health authorities have applied things?
And he also did make a case for why Joe Rogan, is he really that bad?
So, what this is, Matt, this is Tamla.
We're getting Tamla's feedback.
Goddamn Tamla.
It is from Very Bad Wizards.
Damn you, Tamla.
Damn you.
He comes on our show, he spews pro-Joe Rogan propaganda, Anti-vax light talking points.
And we get the splashback negative reviews.
What the hell?
This is so unfair.
We do not endorse Tamla or anything that man stands for.
He believes in ghosts.
Leave your reviews on very bad wizards.
He believes in ghosts.
We're anti-ghosts.
We're very anti-ghosts.
We're pro-anti-ghosts.
Yeah, we're pro-ghostbusters.
We're ghost negative in the Eric Weinstein lingo.
So that reviewer, if you're listening, which of course they're not, they should go to Very Bad Wizards.
Leave your bad reviews there.
Don't bring your garbage and dump it on our lawn.
At the same time, Ry-Ry's a bit of a moron, isn't he?
Like, I mean, if he got that far into the episode where Tamler is, you know, making his half-hearted defense of Rogan, you've already listened to the intro explaining that he's a guest and we're openly disagreeing with him in that part.
That guy being confused.
Is this the podcast host?
Are they advocating this?
Like, come on.
We don't want you as a listener.
You couldn't even work out who's the guest.
Yeah, keep up, mate.
Keep up.
You've got to be on the ball.
You've got to be sharp to listen to this podcast.
Well, Chris, that all makes sense.
The people that left us positive reviews were witty and wry and charming.
And the person that left a negative review is clearly an idiot.
So, you know, all is right with the world.
No cognitive dissonance whatsoever.
Nope, that's the reason.
And now, Matt, speaking of people operating under the shadow of cognitive dissonance, our Patreons!
Our Patreons!
Lovely, lovely Patreons!
Yum, yum, yum, yum.
You know the one thing I don't like?
Technically, in Patreon lingo, the people who are part of your Patreon are called Patrons.
Patrons.
Patrons, they're not called patrons.
They're called pat-o-rons.
Yeah. No, but patrons.
Patrons.
Patrons.
Is that how you pronounce that?
Like without the E?
Patrons.
That's how I pronounce it.
Okay, fine.
That's all right.
Patrons.
We'll just delete all that.
You know, you know.
No, we won't.
No, we won't.
I'm doing the editing.
Oh, no.
Oh, no.
Yeah.
Chris, Chris, say egregious.
Say egregious.
Egregious.
That's easy, Matt.
What's the problem?
Let's see.
Nobody's even heard that, Matt, because it's always been edited out.
So, yeah.
Yeah.
So anyway, with that important point noted, we have to find the soil will save us.
These are our galaxy brain gurus, incidentally.
The soil will save us.
A little bit nationalist for my liking, but, you know, your username.
No, no, no, no.
I'm sure it's ecological.
It's an ecological message there.
Oh, okay, that's better.
Nothing to do with blood.
No blood in soil.
Yeah, he didn't mention blood.
That's true.
So, safe there.
Christian, David Small, Tom V, Kyle Wilson, KST3141.
And Shane Gronholtz.
Thank you, one and all.
Very good.
Yeah.
Play the clip.
I'll do that.
You're sitting on one of the great scientific stories that I've ever heard, and you're so polite.
And, hey, wait a minute.
Am I an expert?
I kind of am.
Yeah.
I don't trust people at all.
Okay, so those were the galaxy brain gurus, revolutionary geniuses.
We have Himish Buchan.
Buchan?
Buchan.
Stephen Conopec.
Thank you.
Stephen Conopec.
Conopec.
Stephen Conopec.
Andy Seaton.
God, I feel like a fucking alien trying to, you know, just read words that are in normal language.
Anyway, Jan Demi.
Dag Soros.
Sean Carmody, Mitchell W, and Greg Binder.
And by the way, Matt, Dag Soros, just to mention, Dag Soros is a kind of famous comedian from Norway.
So we have a famous comedian who listens to us from Norway.
I continue to be in awe at the way you pronounce these things.
Like how anyone could pronounce Carmody, Carmody.
Carmody?
Yeah, yeah.
Well, yeah, I'm sorry about that, but that's what I do.
That's what I do.
Pronunciation is not my strong suit.
But you are revolutionary thinkers, and we thank you.
Maybe you can spit out that hydrogenated thinking and let yourself feed off of your own thinking.
What you really are is an unbelievable thinker and researcher, a thinker that the world doesn't know.
Correct.
Thank you, Eric.
And last, but certainly not least, Matt, the conspiracy hypothesizers, the people who set up the hypothesizers, hypotheses to be knocked down.
They are Hashim Mude, Hashim Mude, maybe, Heller Gewerding, Frederick Dumont, Timothy Robin, Jack, Amira E., Alan Coogan, and...
No lips or joints.
Oh, no lips or joints.
Okay, that's not a word.
No lips or joints.
I like that last one.
Okay, yeah.
Thank you, one and all.
Very good.
Very good.
Thank you.
Every great idea starts with a minority of one.
We are not going to advance conspiracy theories.
We will advance conspiracy hypotheses.
Okay, so that's that for today, Matt.
And, you know, for people interested on the Patreon, there is extra content there.
We put the interviews out.
We put out the Decoding Academia series where we discuss papers and that kind of thing.
And yeah, there's tons of bonus stuff that we have there.
Yeah.
And coming up on the Decoding Academia series, there's an interesting paper suggested by Chris about different types of sort of imitation between children and chimpanzees and the kind of links that has to cultural transmission.
Yeah.
Good stuff.
You should subscribe.
That's right.
Good benefits.
If you want to look at things through an evolutionary lens.
