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May 13, 2020 - Dark Horse - Weinstein & Heying
55:16
E14 - The Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying | Finding Nuance | DarkHorse Podcast

The struggle to find nuanced information in a polarized and politicized landscape of information. The 14th livestream from Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying in their continuing discussion surrounding the novel coronavirus. Link to the Q&A portion of this episode: https://youtu.be/GTP_u1ax4yUSupport the Show.

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Welcome to the Dark Horse podcast live stream.
This is what, our 14th?
It is our 14th.
I am sitting with Dr. Heather Hying, as has become our habit, and we have lots of things that we were excited to discuss with you today.
Do we have any housekeeping up front, other than asking people?
Please like, subscribe, and Hit the notification bell and be sure to set it to notify you always of content on this channel as people who do not have it set to always sometimes miss out and they discover that we are going live, for example, with no warning.
You had also said something about addressing Super Chat questions, which we'll do in the second live stream, right?
Quite correct.
Yes, we will be addressing your Super Chat questions in the second live stream, but as an experiment, and I think it went well, I announced on Twitter that I would take two questions from Twitter, and so that the suspense does not kill those people who submitted questions over Twitter, I will tell you that Ari, I will have us answer your question about Madagascar's announced cure.
And Brandon Engler, we will address your question of how our concept of collective consciousness maps onto Jung's concept of the collective unconscious.
So you can look forward to those in the Super Chat section, which we will get to in Well, we'll do this for about an hour, and then we'll have a 15-minute break, and then we will return to address those questions.
So you can file Super Chat questions here, and we will collect them, and then we will collect some more questions in the second stream.
And we'll get through as many as we can, but we never get through all of them.
Yep, there's never enough time.
All right.
Did you want to start off?
Yeah, I have a little soliloquy-like thing to start us off with, which you are then, I imagine, going to riff on, and that'll set us off.
Awesome.
So I want to start by thanking many of the people in the audience who disagree with us about some or many points, but keep coming back, nevertheless.
To hear what a conversation between two people who are interested in discovering the truth sounds like, and hopefully also to learn, to figure out where you might be wrong, where we might be wrong, where maybe both of us are wrong.
Not just both of us, but your understanding and our understanding might both be wrong on something.
We've heard directly from many of you, and we appreciate you.
In the last couple weeks, though, we've noticed an uptick in people offering critique that isn't really critique.
It's fascinating, really, what agendas and traits people will attribute to others when what they actually want to say is, I disagree and I can't defend the disagreement.
So there are lots of names for the various fallacies, ad hominem being one of them, where you attack the person rather than the ideas.
There may well be reason to disagree with us on any number of fronts, but saying, for instance, as I've heard a number of times now, you have secure jobs so it's easy to defend the lockdown.
is a non-argument.
Pointing out possible conflicts of interest for people, making arguments, is a legitimate approach, but this one isn't.
Aside from that, this particular-- It's also not accurate.
Aside from that, this particular accusation doesn't turn out to be true, right?
We have secured jobs during-- so lockdown is meaningless to us just isn't true.
Most listeners will know, in fact, that we did have secure jobs, jobs that appeared secure anyway, that were supposed to be secure for life.
But Brett and then I stood up to the loons who had taken over the college where we were tenured.
And so, very long story short, we're not college professors anymore, and we haven't been for closing in on three years this fall.
We don't have an employer, so we don't have salaries, and we don't have employer-sponsored healthcare.
We do have reach, though, now, far more than we did when we were professors, and that has allowed us to do these live streams and find audience, and that reach was also necessary in getting the wonderful book contract that we've got.
And so I'm not saying this to complain, but I am saying that reach is not the same as security or salary.
And with regard to the particular topics that we are often interested in raising, reaching people may in fact be in a trade-off relationship with security.
So I still believe that the vast number of people on both sides of the aisle, that is the political metaphor stemming from the truth in the United States Senate, that people, Democrats and Republicans, sit literally on opposite sides of the aisle.
People on both sides of the aisle are good-hearted, good faith, and legitimately interested in hearing what people of different opinions have to say.
I think the vast majority of people it is true for.
But I see a world that is polarizing fast, and we've alluded to this in maybe each of our last live streams, that we see this star-bellied snitches and snitches without landscape, people wearing masks and people without, people wearing MAGA hats and people without, and it's become this easy tell by which you can imagine that you know everything else that's true about a person and not think any further about what might be true of them.
I want to say that more and more people on the far left, but what we're seeing right now is more and more people on the far right, are taking personal umbrage at those who see the world differently from them, and take it as evidence that those people with whom they disagree are themselves stupid or incompetent or even evil.
One of the upshots of our rather dramatic expulsion from Evergreen is that many good people on the right are familiar with us now and find value in what we say.
This has, I think, led algorithms by YouTube and the like to promote our videos along with those of actual right-leaning people.
In fact, I spent a little time Logged in, not as myself, looking to see what videos were suggested after ours.
And sure enough, it looks like we've been logged that way in among some right-leaning videos, which is not in and of itself a bad thing.
But it does mean that when the uninitiated, when those people who don't know us, click on our videos and find us critiquing bad ideas across the board, Bad ideas on the right and bad ideas on the left.
We're more likely to hear objections from people on the right because they're more likely to have had their expectations broken by the algorithms and by us, but not because we were ever dishonest about what we are.
We're on the left.
We've been saying that forever, even as the pseudo-progressives at Evergreen called us racists and fascists and Nazis and all that jazz.
People on the left get upset when we don't critique Trump or the Republicans enough.
And when we do critique policies coming out of the White House, we are told that we're only critiquing them because we're knee-jerk lefties.
Can't win.
Except, you know, we're trying to thread this needle, walk this line carefully.
And I want to say that Trump derangement syndrome is real, and some people can't see anything coming from the current administration as positive or potentially positive.
But TDS, Trump derangement syndrome, has a mirror image syndrome.
Which I'll call pro-Trump derangement syndrome.
And the pro-Trump derangement syndrome guys can't abode any critique of the man's actions or policies.
And that's just as knee-jerk and just as deranged, frankly.
So that's not how democracy works.
It's not how we, any of us, not just Brett and me, but any of us refine our understanding of the world to make it a better and better match for reality.
We need people to share information, to analyze it, and we need critique of both the information and the analysis.
We need to imagine that with rare exceptions, nobody is wholly wrong and nobody is wholly right.
I think that some of where this confusion is coming from can be found in how science is actually taught.
We have here and elsewhere critiqued modern education, and specifically modern science education, quite a lot, and we will continue to do so.
But how science is taught, and therefore understood by much of the population, is you're given litanies of facts to memorize at school.
And you aren't offered a dive into the scientific method, which is in fact the core of science.
So if what you think science is, is a rote list of facts that are true, have always been understood to be true, and will always be understood to be true, you will think that uncertainty is failure, and it's unsciency.
But in fact, it's the exact opposite.
Uncertainty is not failure.
Total certainty, in fact, especially in the face of new and rapidly changing landscapes like the one we find ourselves in with this pandemic, is anti-scientific.
Total certainty will likely sell soda and chips, and anxiety and despair, but it's not going to help anyone gain understanding.
It's like everyone wants superheroes and supervillains, but it's never actually fact-checked to see if they've ever met any of those.
Not only are superheroes and supervillains vanishingly rare, if not completely non-existent, news accounts are often going to be a mixed bag as well, as are scientific results.
This is to be expected.
This is what complexity looks like.
Demanding certainty and categorical results is a juvenile position.
What you'll get if you demand certainty and categorical results is garbage.
Sold to you.
And less understanding of what the world is, how it works, and how you might change it for the better.
So in conclusion, before I hand off to you, we're going to be wrong sometimes.
Everyone's going to be wrong sometimes.
And also sometimes the reality that we discover or that we reveal that other people have discovered through scientific analysis or just through the passage of time, as for instance this virus reveals itself to be something that we don't currently understand it to be, It's going to be ugly sometimes, and not to our liking.
That everyone is sometimes wrong, first, and that reality is sometimes ugly, are universal truths.
You can't change reality, though, by denying it, or by calling the people talking about it bad names, or ascribing motives to them that don't exist or are irrelevant to the conversation.
You could, however, understand that reality as best as you can, and use that newfound knowledge in useful and honorable ways.
Wow, that's excellent.
There's a lot there that gives voice to some things I've been thinking as well.
I didn't get all the way to coming up with a name for whatever the mirror image of Trump derangement syndrome is, but I have been thinking.
I have never seen anything like this before.
The idea of a president who is beyond critique is an absurdity.
And we can argue whether, you know, Trump is much more deserving of critique than others who might inhabit the office.
But nonetheless, the very idea that you can't critique him without evidencing some sort of a confusion or a hidden agenda or something like that is Very upsetting.
And I think there's a way in which it actually emerges from the man himself.
And I'm reminded when we were college professors, and it was not infrequent that we would end up advising students.
We knew our students quite well because of the way Evergreen worked.
So our students were full-time students in our single program that we taught.
And, you know, we knew them all by name.
We knew many of their lives pretty well.
They would ask us for advice and one of the pieces of advice that I found myself giving very frequently was don't even consider marrying anybody who doesn't have a sense of humor about themselves.
They're just not marriage material, which I think is an upsetting problem because there are a lot of people in that category and it's sad to think that they may not be appropriate for a relationship.
Wow, I wouldn't elect anybody president who didn't have a sense of humor about themselves either, and while this president does an awful lot of joking, it is almost always at other people's expense, and he is incredibly thin-skinned when any critique comes his way, which, in light of the fact that he does not appear to be expert in the kinds of things that he's being called upon to navigate, is very troubling indeed.
So, if I can just add one final thing.
You can tell very frequently what kind of person someone is based on how they deal with the discovery that they have been incorrect.
Now one thing you can do is you can rationalize and sweep it under the rug and pretend it didn't happen.
Now you're wrong twice.
Not only were you wrong the first time, but your claim to have always been in the position that you now hold is also wrong.
So that is not an indication of character.
And we will be wrong.
We have been wrong here, and we have been careful, I think, each time we've been wrong in a significant way to come back and say, here's where it was, and here's how the error happened.
And boy, let me tell you, it's not fun.
I don't like, I would very much like to be right.
I don't like discovering that I'm wrong, and doing it in front of a large audience is very difficult, but the point is, wow, is it a better deal than sticking with some wrong position so as not to admit that you made an error, which is of course human.
And it's always hard to navigate, you know, when do you say, you know, I've, I'm putting my internal estimation at 95% on this thing, and I'm going to go ahead and say it.
And, and with, you know, without the sort of the error bars built in, and then, okay, maybe it's one, it's that one in 20 times that I was wrong.
You have to come back and fix it.
Or you speak in terms of uncertainties and probabilities and, you know, more often than not, not numbers explicitly, but implicit numerical thinking, quantitative thinking.
And that drives a lot of people crazy.
Not just because, again, our educational system is so bad that most people who should completely be able to understand some quantitative thinking actually can't through no fault of their own, often.
But it also doesn't fit with a landscape of buy it now, get your answer, be on your way, have the thing in your back pocket that you have to say when someone asks you a question, and don't think about it ever again.
There is no set and forget over in scientific discovery space.
You can't do it that way.
No, you can't.
And in some sense, I think if we go upstream from the problem that you started out pointing us towards, it is a consequence.
It's a downstream consequence of the politicization of everything.
And I think for those of us who understand Why science works and how delicate the process is, it's very frightening to see it become politicized because it still looks like science.
But what it does is it eliminates our ability to navigate well in all of our interest.
It blinds us, right?
And you can get it.
You know, if you're on the road going straight, you can afford to close your eyes for a few seconds.
But the point is going straight is it's a short road at that level and we have to do better.
So we are now seeing this come, I don't know, full circle is the wrong term, but we are seeing it amplified by this crisis into something very, very dangerous where the problem is where you fall out politically is very likely to inform your sense of whether or not it is safe for America to open back up.
Why does that make any sense at all?
This is an empirical question.
Now we can, you know, maybe differ over how many deaths we would tolerate in order to get things running again, but... But I still haven't heard that discussion, actually.
Yeah.
We've raised that as a potential discussion that is worth having, albeit dangerous and fraught, but I haven't run into that anywhere.
And, you know, I hope and presume it's happening some places.
But it really seems to be people yelling at each other about, you're wrong about what you believe, as opposed to, here are my values, and we differ on values, and we're going to have to make some difficult decisions.
It is suspicious that the two things are fused together.
If you believe that we should open back up, then you believe that the number of people who would be killed by our doing so would be low.
Right.
And in fact, these are two separate questions.
People will die either way.
We can have a discussion about what number of deaths would be tolerable.
And then we can have a discussion about what the evidence suggests would happen.
And those are two distinct things.
But by fusing them together, we can recognize that this is a purely political discussion.
The scientific community is also artificially united behind these positions that are, in many cases, just absolutely upsetting.
And if I can make this personal for a second, there's something incredibly troubling.
Some weeks ago, maybe it's months ago at this point, I said what I thought was a perfectly nuanced thing over Twitter about vaccines, which, as I said, we favor them.
We have vaccinated our children, but I still don't believe that we fully understand the dangers or that they're completely safe.
And I don't.
But, you know, hopefully you heard me say I believe in them enough that we vaccinated our children.
So I'm a believer in vaccine.
It's potentially one of the most important health discoveries in all of medicine.
Absolutely, and in fact our family is probably much more vaccinated than almost any other American family simply because of the amount of tropical travel we've done and the additional number of vaccines that one gets in order to go to places with a large slew of diseases that you don't run into if you're in the U.S.
There is evidence right there.
The first part of what you said isn't a feint.
It's not a lie.
It is absolutely fundamental to the statement, but the second part of the statement is also true.
The second part is true, and the pushback I got over Twitter, even from some sophisticated people, was effectively, we cannot have a nuanced discussion here.
You have to toe the party line.
Now, why is anybody telling me that I have to toe the scientific party line?
First of all, I've earned a credential that allows me to say what I think, and maybe it comes with, you know, you can decide my Degree is meaningless.
Maybe it is, but the point is it's at least somebody who knows a bit of biology is saying actually on balance I'm doing this thing, but I'm not all that comfortable with the safety.
My work on the question of drug safety and mice suggests that maybe I have even more insight, but How is it that you can tell?
So just for those few who don't know what you're talking about, there's a lot more to be said here, but you can look at your brother's, Eric Weinstein's Portal episode, I don't remember the number.
I think it's 19.
19, okay, with you from, I guess it was released while we were in the Amazon, so January of this year, in which you tell the story.
Yeah, but in any case, it's not, you know, at the point that People were accusing us of racism and we were forced to resign from our professional lives.
These people didn't rally to our defense.
Academia was more or less silent with a few notable exceptions.
You know, Robbie George and Jonathan Haidt, Jerry Coyne.
Right.
But by and large, academia was quiet, and certainly there was not enough of a groundswell to protect us.
Nicholas Christakis.
Sorry.
Nicholas Christakis, of course.
But in any case, at the point that we want to talk nuance about the safety of drugs or vaccines or any of those things, yeah, we have to do it responsibly.
But to get this pushback that says, actually, no, you have to tie the party line, where does that sense of obligation even come from?
Well, and it's, it reminds me actually of conversations that we had in graduate school in the 90s, in which we were told by a professor whom we respected greatly in many regards, and who at the time, it was early in grad school, so we were thinking, we were looking for who to work with.
And he told us that there are just some questions that one should not ask, because the answers might be ugly.
Oh, and the questions were indeed the questions that are now, they've become a focus for us and they are the things that make people nervous about evolutionary psychology and They're around whether or not there are differences between the sexes and what they might be, and whether or not there are differences between the races and what they might be.
Those sorts of things.
Yeah.
Alright, so maybe we should move from this discussion into another land of nuance where we find a bizarrely monolithic and un-nuanced presentation from the expert class.
Zach, do you want to put up the PDF file?
Yeah, we can't see it yet.
So what this is, is a quick and dirty flowchart that I put together that basically tracks my own internal understanding of the likelihood of the COVID-19 pandemic having arisen through different pathways.
On the far left here you can see wild coronavirus transmitted directly from a bat to a human in the wild.
And I've got that at something like...
A 2% likelihood.
And then there, if you look at the second box from the left, you see it having gone from a wild bat to a human through the seafood market.
So not somebody traveling through a cave.
And if that were to have happened directly, I would say there's probably a 2% chance of something like that having happened.
If it went through an intermediate, like a pangolin, then I would give that maybe 3%.
And my point here is not to defend each of these percentages.
You'll see that the date here is May 9th when I initially intended to show this diagram.
I didn't change it because I have seen nothing since May 9th that has appreciably altered my understanding of these probabilities.
And we talked in some depth in the episode, it's called Unintelligent Design, I think, about why we both put the chances that this was actually some sort of a hybrid or a genetically engineered virus at such a high number.
Yes.
So you defend these numbers, not in terms of the actual numbers, but you defend the relative values in an earlier lab study.
Yes.
And in fact, I will say that the estimate, my estimate of how likely this is to be an engineered virus has actually gone up since that live stream based on further analyses that I've seen.
So anyway, my point here, I've got a couple of them.
One is internally, whatever dialogue you're having with yourself, You'd be wise to put together something like this.
A, so you can track the change in your opinion over time and you don't fool yourself into thinking that you've believed X, Y, or Z all along.
B, it allows you to step away from the artificial certainty that colors many of the discussions that we find ourselves having, right?
So, in my mind, I know from the fact that I actually went through the exercise of putting this on paper, That I think that there's close to a 90% chance that this was an accidental escape from a laboratory.
Right?
Now that percentage could go down and as I've said elsewhere, I hope that it does.
I am rooting for the explanation for this pandemic to be some sort of a natural encounter with a naturally occurring virus.
I don't want science to be responsible for this because I am depending on science to help get us out of the terrible situation that we find ourselves in in civilization.
And if we scientists are in some sense responsible for what has happened here, that's a huge setback.
Nonetheless, I'm not going to let that affect what I think the likelihood is.
My second point here would be, why is it that as trained biologists, yes, we are not virologists, we are not epidemiologists, but as trained biologists looking at the vast quantity of information but as trained biologists looking at the vast quantity of information and analysis available to us, you and I come out so far from the established community of virologists who, for all I can tell, are a very good
Those who are involved in being paid as virologists at top-tier places are united in their claim that this couldn't have come from either of the labs in Wuhan.
And even if they are correct that it didn't, I can't see where they would come out with it couldn't have.
Right.
How do you get to a zero or 100% probability?
Right.
Now, were you in the primary lab in Wuhan, the Zhejiangli lab in Wuhan, you might know a great deal.
than the rest of the community.
In other words, you might know that the sequence doesn't match anything that passed through your lab, and therefore it had to have come a different route.
But how the rest of the community arrives there is very unclear in light of the fact that responsibility, if this did come through that lab, will rest with them, and therefore there's a tremendous burden for them to lie to themselves if possible, and if not, to potentially tell the world a much clearer story than makes sense.
So, what I would suggest, in fact I will call upon the Virology community to do some soul searching.
We ought to be a very easy pair to convince if this is actually a compelling story.
If we've misunderstood something, we ought to be very easy to convince.
If we are not convincible, because the story isn't nearly as clear as you're painting it, it is time for people to acknowledge the ambiguity.
And it is necessary that you do so, because I would like to point out what happens if you don't.
If you don't acknowledge the ambiguity in this story, and the data continues to suggest a strong possibility of this having emerged accidentally or otherwise from laboratories, then the entire virology community will have rested its reputation on a false claim.
And at this moment, we cannot afford to have the entire virology community Compromised by a lie.
So what I want to see is some acknowledgement that this is an ambiguous story.
And for those of you who are not in the virology community, I want you to think about the following thing.
I want you to recognize that every time you are told that this is not an engineered virus and that it didn't come through a lab, you are being told implicitly that the fact that this virus shows up first In a place that has two virology labs studying coronaviruses in bats is a coincidence, even though the bats in question do not occur in that location.
So, if nothing else, that is an amazing level of coincidence, and those who are telling us that this story is secure should acknowledge it up front.
They should say, we know that this is hard to believe, but this didn't come from a lab even though it shows up in a place where there were two labs it might have come from, Can we segue from there?
widespread and the bats otherwise do not occur in this locale." All right.
You can take that diagram seems to be down.
Okay.
Can we segue from there?
I promised on Twitter maybe unwisely to suggest an alteration in the names that we apply.
I actually think that talking briefly about the critiques of the pandemic video is a really excellent segue first.
Okay.
Can we go in there first?
Yep.
So we talked last time just a little bit about the Plandemic video, the documentary that's maybe two hours and which has a lot of stuff in it that's just clearly ridiculous.
And then the 28 minute shorter version that is mostly an interview with Judy Do you know how to pronounce it?
Mikovits?
Mikovits?
I think it's Mikovits.
Okay.
Mikovits, who is a virologist who's making a lot of remarkable claims.
And we basically said last time, we're probably not going to, we were asked by a lot of people to basically take it apart piece by piece and give our critique.
And we said, there's a lot wrong and there's a few things that seem right.
And that leaves so much that we can't assess individually that we're really not sure that it's worth our time.
So, what I want to do, rather than critique it point by point, is point to, Zach, if you would put up what's on my computer screen now.
This is a journalistic piece that was published in Science, one of the two major scientific journals worldwide, called Fact-Checking Judy Mikovits, The Controversial Virologist Attacking Anthony Fauci in a Viral Conspiracy Video.
The viral conspiracy video being, I think, the 28 minute long one that we have seen.
So I want to point out, this is Science Magazine, the journal of record, where if you can get your empirical results or your theoretical results in this journal, that or Nature is where you want to be.
And they say, these two authors, these two science journalists, critique her points excellently, mostly.
So among other things, I'll just read a couple of them.
She says in the video, I was held in jail with no charges, and they revealed that she's dishonestly portraying her own history.
That the charges were clear and she was in jail for a couple of days, and that's not to downplay the idea of being in jail for a couple of days, but the charges were always clear.
So dishonestly portraying your own history is a red flag, for sure.
She says, there was no vaccine currently on the schedule for any RNA virus that works.
We were asked about this in the Q&A last time, and we weren't sure.
Someone said, oh yeah, for sure, for other species.
And these guys say, yeah, actually there are vaccines for the following RNA viruses.
Influenza, measles, mumps, rubella, rabies, yellow fever, and Ebola.
So, that's kind of a long list, actually.
She says, wearing the mask literally activates your own virus.
You're getting sick from your own reactivated coronavirus expressions, and if it happens to be SARS-CoV-2, then you've got a big problem.
So, when I saw this, I thought, what does she mean by coronavirus expressions?
What does that even refer to?
That's not a term of art in science, as far as I know, and the authors of this piece say the same thing.
I've seen nothing anywhere suggesting that wearing a mask can activate viruses and make people sick.
The ridiculous arguments early on were that it won't do any good, and it turns out that those are mostly political arguments to keep people from stockpiling PPEs when they should be reserved for healthcare workers.
That's at least the most generous interpretation of what was going on.
But this is the first and only time I've ever seen anyone say actually masks, mask wearing itself will make you sick.
And this also sounds like gobbledygook, and this is the point that you referenced last time, Brett.
She says, why would you close the beach?
You've got sequences in the soil and the sand.
You've got healing microbes in the ocean, the saltwater.
That's insanity.
So as regular viewers of these live streams will be aware, we also think that closing the beaches is a mistake.
and has been from the beginning.
But what Mikovits means by sand or soil sequences and how they might be relevant to people being healed by being out there is, like I say, gobbledygook.
So I think you can take that down now, Zach.
That all seems like these science journalists did a really compelling job of basically point by point taking what she said in order and disabusing us, the readers, the viewers, of the sense that she has any credibility at all.
But...
There are a few places in the same article where they make exactly the sort of circling the wagon style arguments that you were just talking about.
Quote, there is no evidence this bat virus was manipulated.
Believe it or not, come down on that side of the equation or not, there are plenty of people talking about it.
There is a lot of evidence that's been produced across a lot of domains.
So the idea that science, the premier American journal of science, scientific communication and scientific findings, can say with no apparent irony, there is no evidence this virus was manipulated, in an otherwise thorough and it seems well-researched takedown of Mikovits, Makes a person wonder.
And there's one more of these at least.
She says in the video, Mikabit says, heads of our entire Department of Health and Human Services colluded and destroyed my reputation and the Department of Justice and the FBI sat on it and kept that case under seal.
And the Science article responds, Now, I'm not saying they did.
I have no idea.
But the idea that you need to provide direct evidence of collusion against you in order to demonstrate that there's collusion against you reminds me of that moment in the year before we left Evergreen when you started talking about the culture of fear that was taking over.
And you literally had our colleagues coming to you saying, prove that there's a culture of fear.
Tell us who's scared.
Yeah.
You can't, the idea that her lacking direct evidence of the collusion is evidence of lack of collusion is laughable.
So, what do you do with that?
Almost everything in the video, the Plandemic video, is ridiculous, but not all of it.
Well, and, you know, I mean, I'm glad you came around in the end to this point about what do you do with an article that appears to make many valid points and has fused them to points that, to my mind, are effectively indefensible, right?
To say there's no evidence of this being an engineered virus, well, yeah, you can set an evidentiary standard where There is no evidence, but then no evidence is conceivable.
Yeah.
Because if you wanted to talk about what the preponderance of evidence said in this case, it does point in that direction and in fact raises all kinds of questions about whether this virus even could have come from nature in the form that we saw it.
So, you have science here that is doing this.
Science the journal.
The journal science doing this job where it has taken True points and points that appear to be false and has linked them together in such a way that first of all lay people will you know at best come away with the sense of I don't know what that is but make it go away which means that they will miss the good points.
But we also have the journal Nature doing this.
So the wagons have been circled amongst all of the establishment virologists and the two major journals that are, you know, as you said, the journals of record, are both selling a false story that, you know, it's not that they need to Uh, come out with some sort of conclusion in the other direction.
There's still ambiguity here, but what is clear is that there's a great deal of uncertainty with respect to origin, and there is an awful lot of evidence.
And, you know, as I said last time, the evidence that there is something very odd about this virus and that it emerged from a lab in one way or another is growing stronger, not weaker.
So the trend over time is pointing in the other direction.
Alright, which does lead me to the point about the name of this virus and disease.
I am increasingly troubled that a phenomenon which is affecting almost all of 7 plus billion people on this planet, either directly or indirectly, is traveling under names that function as jargon.
So I will argue that there are things called terms of art.
These are technical terms that you actually need in order to have a proper discussion.
And then there's jargon, which are terms that are artificially complicated in order to keep people who are not in the club from discussing them properly.
And unfortunately, the names that we're using, both COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2, Both of these things are like something that you would label a specimen or a vial with.
These are not proper terms for us to be discussing these phenomena.
What's more, they're not even accurate.
In the case of SARS-CoV-2, well it turns out over time The medical complications arising from this virus are so perplexing and vast that to call this a respiratory syndrome at all is misleading.
I mean, it's causing heart attacks and it's causing strokes and it's causing, you know, the loss of the sense of smell and all sorts of other things.
So let me just say that unlike the scientific names over in the normal organism space, that is not viral space, which do not pretend to indicate mechanism or something that accompanies the organism itself, the actual name here, the scientific name, is this hybrid of a description of the phylogeny, the history, which is the Cove part, the coronavirus part,
And the SARS, which is kind of an indicator of the history, but it's also an indicator of the effect that it has.
Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome being what SARS stands for.
So it's this confusing hybrid of kind of what over in non-human space we would call the ecology and the deep history combined in a name which is supposed to really only reflect the deep history.
The ecology is to be discovered by other people at other times.
Right, and the 19 in COVID-19, while technically defensible in the sense that it started in 19 as far as we know, is out of phase with the fact that mostly it's unfolding in 20.
And so, in any case, these names suck.
And I'm not arguing that professionals need to stop using them.
If it facilitates your work in a hospital or a laboratory, You know, go right ahead.
But for the rest of us, the terms that we use to discuss whether or not we can afford to, you know, to relax the lockdown, for example, the terms should be accessible to everybody.
They should be, you know, English words, for example.
So I'm going to suggest That, A, we've been told that we mustn't reference China or Wuhan because that's racist somehow.
And I think this is garbage because what we know is that the most recent common ancestor of the virus that is currently spreading across the globe and causing so much illness started in Wuhan.
Now, if you look at my diagram... Hey, Zach, can you put my diagram back up?
If you look at my diagram, you'll see I've left, I think it's a 1% chance over on the far right for this having been an intentional release.
I think the chances of this are very low.
But if it was intentionally released, then it would make sense that it was intentionally released in Wuhan in order to mislead us about its source.
You would release it somewhere where there was a lab that people would come to blame.
But in any case, even under that scenario, the fact is it began to spread in Wuhan.
So I'm going to argue that the proper terms for this should be the Wuhan Enigma virus, since there's much that is unknown about it.
And given the amount that is medically unclear about it, Wuhan Enigma Syndrome.
And I think those capture where we are.
They properly allow us to describe a syndrome that seems to be just simply adding new symptoms by the day, and it does not artificially confine us to regarding this as a respiratory illness or a blood illness or whatever else we might be tempted to do.
And I think it leaves open the full range of possibilities for where this thing was generated, if that's what happened, and certainly where it emerged and began to spread.
So I'm going to push back on this.
All right.
It's true that we do call many diseases by the names of the places that they were most associated with.
Spanish flu being the easy example.
It's been discussed a lot because it's 101 years ago, I think, is when that pandemic happened.
But the place is, again, an aspect of the ecology.
And in general, the names, and I think maybe what's not clear, what I'm not sure you made clear, but what is clear between us that we know about scientific names, the naming of organisms in general, is that there's always some
Some Latin binomial, when it's an organism that's on the tree of life, it's not a virus, some two-word name like Homo sapiens or Felis silvestris or Canis familiaris, humans, domestic cats, domestic dogs, that with that genus and specific epithet you can actually, implied in that is the entire history of the lineage All the way back in time to the origin of life on Earth.
You can't do the same thing with viruses, right?
Because viruses are polyphyletic, meaning that they have multiple origins, and we don't know where many of those origins were, and they presumably sometimes emerged out of the tree of life that was already extant.
So we can't have nearly such a clear phylogenetic name But the cove part of SARS-CoV-2 is descriptive.
It stands for coronavirus, and so I'm not prepared here.
As you know, I wanted to do a whole names thing, and maybe I'll do it as a separate video.
But You know, there is a nested set of viruses within viral sub-families and families and all that you can take out and take out into ever more inclusive sets, and the Cove part, the coronavirus part, is a real
Evolutionary entity that abandoning that in this seems to me like that's a huge a huge loss but what we don't have is a distinction between actually everyone is stuck using the scientific name because whereas when it's a warbler I don't know if it's the birders or who that get to decide the common name.
And boy, birders come up with some funky, fancy common names for birds.
But right now, the scientists, the virologists are coming up with the scientific names, and the politicians are jostling for the common name.
And you're proposing a new common name, but It sounds to me like it's just as murky and messy as all the rest.
What it doesn't have is an acronym that many people wouldn't know what it meant.
But to the extent that you're defending COVID, right?
Well, I was defending SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19 being the disease.
I think it's actually more pronounceable, but I was not defending the name of the disease so much, in part because I know almost nothing about how diseases tend to be named.
The name of an organism is something in which you and I both have substantial background and we understand not only what happens, but why it tends to happen, and I think I have a fairly good grasp of Sort of where the bodies are buried and what makes sense.
Whereas how diseases come to be named, I know far less.
And it seems to me that it is inherently political.
I think this one was named by the WHO, which is another reason to dislike it.
That the amount of misinformation and false starts out of the WHO does not suggest that their naming convention is one that we ought to inscribe into history.
So, SARS-CoV-2.
You think SARS is still an appropriate way to refer to this?
Well, I think, again, I'm not prepared for this the way I have been in previous live streams when we didn't get to it, but if memory serves, SARS, which appears to be this ecological description, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, which describes what people who get infected with this virus experience, has become an indicator of the place in the phylogeny.
And I'm not saying that's wise, but it's a little bit like chiroptera, right?
So chiroptera means hand wing.
It's the Latin name for the group of mammals that everyone else knows as bats, but I use it because you've been a bat biologist at some point in the past, right?
So hand wing describes a piece of, you know, the anatomy that allows for the ecology that is really totally descriptive of bats.
That's okay, even though bats could, or you know, tetrapods, the four-legged animals that emerge onto land are still tetrapods, even when they're snakes.
It's not really accurate anymore.
Snakes don't have four legs, but they're still part of that history.
So if I'm right, and I'm not sure I'm right, that SARS in this case is describing a particular piece of the history of the phylogenetics, then it does belong there, even though it is a bad description of what it causes in people.
All right.
I don't know how many other people are going to care about this, but I've got you right where I want you.
Okay, good.
Because now you're telling me that SARS, even though the last S in SARS stands for syndrome, that that is an appropriate phylogenetic delineator.
And it can't be because the whole point of a syndrome ...is that a syndrome allows us to describe the symptoms of a disease without knowing its cause.
So, back before HIV was understood, we knew about AIDS.
AIDS was a syndrome.
Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome.
And the point is, here is a set of symptoms, and we know you're sick with something, but we don't know what it is.
Later on, the discovery of HIV tells us, okay, it's this particular particle acting in this particular way, and that particular particle is related to other particles that we can go find in nature.
So, I think SARS is just a bad descriptor that came from the early understanding of the symptomatology here.
And what we're learning is that any sort of bias is a hazard here.
Because for one thing, we're learning so much about How you can't afford to treat this normally because it may be that, for example, a ventilator is dangerous to you if you have a sufficiently strong cytokine storm.
So anyway, I don't know how far to push it, but I would say there's a lot that is mysterious here.
The nature of the virus is mysterious.
The nature of the syndrome that follows is mysterious.
We're learning a tremendous amount.
And naming it in anything other than English seems to me unfair to the large number of people who are simply having to tolerate our scientific discussions of their fate.
And, you know, if I were one of them, I would want in on those discussions and I would want it described in English.
And you and I would agree the worst possible thing to happen is to allow the people who are politicizing the issue to do the naming.
So, I'm proposing these two.
If you think there are better ones, I'm all ears.
Okay, where are we time-wise?
50 minutes.
There's one set of things I want to do.
I know you've got a lot more that you could you could go after.
No, go ahead.
Okay, well, this this is in the sort of corrections addendums file.
It's a this is a break from what we've been talking about.
There's no natural segue here.
I have a correction if you don't get to it, but we'll see if it's on your list.
Okay, well, I just have the one, really.
I integrated one already into... We didn't say that there weren't any vaccines for RNA viruses, but we weren't sure, and I listed a bunch that were revealed in the science article.
And then there's a question last time in the Q&A for Livestream 13 about a report out in the Military Times that the DoD had apparently restricted coronavirus survivors from enlisting.
And we didn't know about it at the time, and we even thought, oh, Military Times don't know if that's a legit site.
Turns out it is a legit site, and the story is interesting, and it continues to evolve.
So you might show this screen just briefly, Zach.
This is not the story that was alluded to in that question, but a follow-up story, actually.
So originally, the Pentagon had said, actually, we're not going to let anyone, any survivors of, wait for it, COVID-19, to enlist in the U.S. Armed Services at all, full stop.
And there was pushback, considerable pushback.
And the Pentagon then said, as reported in this slightly later Military Times article, that it's narrowing its ban to only prohibiting those who've been hospitalized for the disease.
And then there's even a more recent story now that suggests that there's at least one Republican lawmaker who's pushing back against that ban entirely.
So anyway, that's all very interesting.
In response to the question in real time in the last live stream, I had this pretty naive response actually.
I said, why would they restrict survivors from enlisting?
And I really, given how much we've heard over the years about how much difficulty the U.S.
military has had time, has had getting conscripts, like why are they making it harder now?
But our friend Holly, who's at HollyMathNerd on Twitter, pointed out that this would seem to indicate that there are long-term consequences to the disease that we may not fully understand yet, but maybe the military is either banking on the fact that they are real or they know more than the rest of us do about those long-term health care concerns.
And that is actually, now that she says it, once she said it to me, I thought, oh, of course, of course that would be the reason to restrict people who had been in this, now they've changed it to very sick.
Well, I mean, A, I would point out that this isn't permanent.
They can certainly discover that they've been too cautious and they can relax this rule later.
I don't think it's a bad rule in light of what we don't know here.
It seems like you want to add something here.
Well, I mean, A, I would point out that this isn't permanent.
They can certainly discover that they've been too cautious and they can relax this rule later.
I don't think it's a bad rule in light of what we don't know here.
I mean, for one thing, we don't know whether or not, you know, there's no evidence for, but it could come back for people who have had it.
you know, there's no evidence for, but it could come back for people who have had it.
It could recur.
It could recur.
And if that happens inside of a military unit under, you know, who are housing together somewhere, that could be a major vulnerability.
And if that happens inside of a military unit under, you know, who are housing together somewhere, that could be a major vulnerability.
Absolutely.
You know, worse if this was a bioweapon, as you may have seen on my chart, I think the chances of that are very low.
It's possible that it escaped from bioweapon research.
But in any case, the risk in a military context is significant enough.
The rule isn't permanent.
So I don't see any particular reason to complain about it.
I did want to say, I think it was my error, I said I wasn't sure about the Military Times, and then I did check into it and I found the same thing you did.
It's a perfectly legitimate journalistic site, and so anyway, my apologies.
Let me just say before you get to your correction.
Oh, that was it.
Oh, right there.
Okay.
Um, that, uh, this, this same Holly, a friend of ours, uh, I'm going to give a shout out to her other Twitter, uh, account, which is Great Women of Mathematics.
It's at GWOMaths.
Uh, and it's, it's really quite a wonderful site in which she features women from mathematical history and their contributions.
And right now, she's got a thread and a competition, actually, on the 200th anniversary of the birth, I guess, of Florence Nightingale, who was a founder, which I didn't know, of descriptive statistics.
Yeah.
I had no idea.
And as the thread says, I'll just quote from one of the tweets here, she made statistics accessible to wide audiences by furthering mathematically sound methods of data visualization and presentation and made them beautiful, too.
So, who knew?
Amazing.
If you're interested at all in math and the history of it and how it has changed through time, this is a really fabulous site.
Great women of mathematics.
Yeah, she's a great follow on Twitter.
Totally worth it.
And you will join, I don't know, has JK Rowling recently tweeted about her thread?
So anyway, a very good choice on Twitter.
All right, so I think that covers everything that I was looking to do here.
We should take a 15 minute break and then we can return to do Come back and maybe we'll start with those two Twitter questions, Brett, that you pulled, and then address as many of the Super Chat questions from this first live stream as we can in a limited amount of time, and then start addressing those that come in during the second live stream.
All right, excellent.
We will see you shortly.
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