The 22nd 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://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4ll-gStDKwSupport the Show.
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| Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream. | |
| I believe this is our 22nd live stream. | |
| That's right. | |
| I am here with Dr. Heather Hying, and wow, is there a lot going on in the world. | |
| There sure is. | |
| We are going to have to talk about this and do some analysis. | |
| I thought that actually, though, in light of how much there is that's going on and the fast pace of change, I thought it might be wise just as a counterpoint to open with something that is important But maybe isn't so much of the moment. | |
| So I had an important question for you. | |
| How sure are we that eating dessert in a dream doesn't count? | |
| This is your important question for me. | |
| I mean, you'll agree it's important. | |
| It's not. | |
| Well, I'm pretty sure it is, but you have a sense. | |
| Do you think it counts or do you think actually it's a freebie? | |
| It's a freebie. | |
| I just don't even know how to respond to you here. | |
| Just not my head space. | |
| I'm less sure. | |
| But anyway, take that as it is. | |
| Were you eating cake in your dreams last night? | |
| You know, it happens every so often, and I must say it's never great, but sometimes it's better than you'd expect. | |
| Having what, like listen to Marie Antoinette? | |
| Like, okay, I'll just go ahead and do it. | |
| You know, it's always hard to tell in dreams what actually took place, because you forget it on waking up. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Well, alright, so that's it for not-so-timely-but-important matters. | |
| You wanted to lead us into this landscape so people who maybe aren't aware of where we've landed can be brought up to speed before we do any analysis? | |
| Yeah. | |
| First off, we want to show the clip from Mike Nena's excellent three-part documentary on what happened at Evergreen that we tried to show last time. | |
| But which really does indicate how much what we saw on a college campus three, four, or five years ago has spilled out into the streets right now. | |
| So Zach, if you would show the clip from the hunted individual. | |
| I have to say I keep being invited to talk about free speech on college campuses and every time I'm invited I make the same point which is this isn't about free speech and this is only tangentially about college campuses. | |
| This is about a breakdown in the basic logic of civilization and it's spreading and college campuses may be the first dramatic battle, but of course this is going to find its way into the courts. | |
| It's already found its way into the tech sector. | |
| It's going to find its way to the highest levels of governance, if we're not careful, and it actually does jeopardize the ability of civilization to continue to function. | |
| All right. | |
| So, in light of that, in light of those predictions that you made a couple of years ago, what's happening today, one of the things that is happening today, June 10th, 2020, is a movement accompanied by many hashtags to hashtag shutdown STEM, hashtag shutdown academia, STEM being of course the acronym for science, technology, engineering, and math. | |
| And I thought what we'd do first is show a couple more clips from the very first day of the public parts of the Evergreen protests, and then show a little bit about what the shutdown STEM movement is looking like today, three years later, on college campuses. | |
| May I put a placeholder before we go there? | |
| That clip is from Mike... The clip that you just showed. | |
| The clip that we just showed is from Mike Naina's documentary, and it was at Peter Boghossian's table with Helen Pluckrose, you, James Lindsay, all present, and Mike Naina there filming. | |
| And my point is, one of the things that will come up today is | |
| How much this was apparent in its early phases to some of us and We were told that it wasn't for real or wasn't important But you mustn't get the sense that this was invisible because their whole reason we were sitting around that table was that some of us were very concerned and yeah, I think I did nail it in that clip, but But so did they and so so did many of us and you know, we were being told for years You know really before evergreen blew up. | |
| We were we were talking about this with people we were being told That this was a few niche faculty in the humanities, and it had no bearing on the outside world, and there was no way that this ideology would have the legs to get anywhere. | |
| And here we have people falling all over themselves to be obsequious in the face of a movement that is not what it seems. | |
| It just isn't. | |
| You know, with regard to the Good faith protests that started on the streets, much of that is, and it stems from real, real anger, real hurt over actual history of systemic oppression. | |
| The riots are not that. | |
| And the movement that has co-opted that, and may in fact have been part of what set those protests in motion, is not that. | |
| And certainly what is going on college campuses is not that. | |
| Because the idea that there is active and ongoing systemic oppression of everyone but straight white males on college campuses is flat out batshit crazy. | |
| It just is. | |
| So when we get to the analysis phase, I want to return to that clip, and I want to point a philosophy of science lens at it, because this is the day in which those two things come crashing into each other. | |
| Yeah, they do. | |
| All right, so Zach, do you want to start with the—so before, actually, let me set this up. | |
| On May 23rd, 2017, the protesters, the activists, the people who would become rioters at Evergreen showed up in your classroom, Brett. | |
| And then later in the day, that was 9.30 or so in the morning, later in the day there was another very public meeting that almost became violence on the fourth floor of the library building, the so-called four o'clock meeting. | |
| In between those though was a private meeting between many of the lead protesters, I don't know how many of them are there in the room, 10 or 12, and all of the top admin at the Evergreen State College at the time. | |
| The president, all of the deans, and I believe all of the vice presidents. | |
| So, which includes the Provost. | |
| So all of the top admin at Evergreen have met, are meeting with the lead protesters and once again, the activists have Videoed it and put it online and someone grabbed it and now we have that video. | |
| They put it online on Facebook and an account that goes... It's not my fault, I think. | |
| It's not my fault one took those videos and put them on YouTube, which is the only reason that we are aware of their content. | |
| That's right. | |
| That's right. | |
| So we're going to show you just a couple of tiny clips. | |
| The first one is President Bridges, president of the college, still president to this day, although soon not to be of his own volition, president of the college, promising re-education or banishment of those who don't agree. | |
| This one is subtitled because Mike Nena actually clipped this for me and gave it to me in service of a talk that I gave at Oxford last year on some of these very issues. | |
| So you want to play this one, Zach? | |
| They're going to say some things that we don't like, and our job is to bring them out. | |
| Right. | |
| And what I hear us stating that we are working toward is bring them in, train them, and if they don't get it, sanction them. | |
| Right. | |
| And you must, and I encourage you to hold us accountable to do that. | |
| I'm just going to repeat. | |
| They're going to say some things, said President Bridges, that we don't like, and our job is to bring them on or get them out. | |
| And what I hear us stating that we are working towards is bring them in, train them, and if they don't get it, sanction them. | |
| And you must, and I encourage you, to hold us accountable to doing that. | |
| Very shortly thereafter, like 30 seconds later in this over two hour long meeting for which we have the entire video, we have the lead protester. | |
| Maybe the protester who is most instrumental in making this happen at Evergreen and by far, if not the least honest actor among them, one of them. | |
| Asking the administration of the college, well, I'll let him speak for himself. | |
| If you want to play the third video. | |
| Sorry. | |
| Is there any way to word some sort of language about a commitment towards really targeting STEM in a lot of this? | |
| Everyone needs all of this, but like. | |
| Regarding targeting science. | |
| Like sciences as far as like education about like these kind of issues because like I know like one black woman on this campus is often like one or the only like black and like black woman person in their classroom and basically just has to sit there in the corner and suffer through everything. | |
| And like I can play it all my classes, but then like she's telling me that every single day someone is saying some bullshit and the teachers there aren't educated to do anything. | |
| And so it's definitely not just a science issue. | |
| There's no way there's no way to say that, but like if that's the place where it's like happening the most consistently, I think. | |
| Hey, Zach, this was like a 15-second clip. | |
| Okay. | |
| So, Jamil starts by saying, "Is there any way to word some sort of language about the commitment towards really targeting STEM in a lot of this?" When we first heard that, we were shocked. | |
| And then soon thereafter, when the protesters became rioters and started doing both physical damage on campus and actual assault and battery to students who disagreed with them, the places on campus that were targeted were the library and the science labs. | |
| The windows of the science labs were broken, the Museum of Natural History was vandalized, and the library was vandalized. | |
| Which is exactly in keeping with the idea that in order to get rid of white supremacy, we need to shut down science, technology, engineering, and math. | |
| So let me just say a few words about the thing that is happening right now before we go into more analysis. | |
| We have, I'm going to ask you to show a screenshot here in a minute, Zach, if you would just show both of us, please. | |
| Yeah, so this, if you can show my screen, this is Gizmodo's summary of the goals of Shut Down STEM, quote, white supremacy is baked into science and academia from racist language and textbooks to a culture that excludes black scientists from innovating and advancing at the same pace as their colleagues. | |
| But rather than more milquetoast statements and diversity initiatives, researchers want action. | |
| Organizers are asking the scientific community to participate in a works topic on Wednesday, June 10th to bring attention to racism in the world of research. | |
| Just asterisk. | |
| The idea that the culture of academia and science is excluding black scientists from innovating and advancing is a claim for which I have seen exactly zero evidence, but it is a claim that is being tied to the claim that police brutality can target black men in particular disproportionately, for which we do have some evidence. | |
| Right? | |
| Those claims, because they both seem to be about racism, are linked and you're not allowed to disagree with one for fear that you are understood to be disagreeing with the other. | |
| Okay, next one. | |
| Hold on a sec, take off the screen please. | |
| Um, just a, uh, Okay, my trackpad is not working. | |
| This is from the actual Shut Down STEM website, which you can show us now. | |
| Those of us who are not black, particularly those of us who are white, play a key role in perpetuating systemic racism. | |
| Direct actions are needed to stop this injustice. | |
| Unless you engage directly with eliminating racism, you are perpetuating it. | |
| This moment calls for profound change. | |
| Hashtag shutdownacademia and hashtag shutdownstem is the time for white and non-black people of color, this is a new acronym to me, NBPOC, non-black people of color, to not only educate themselves but to define a detailed plan of action to carry forward. | |
| And Wednesday, June 10th will mark that day. | |
| Okay, so we can take that down. | |
| That's one more thing. | |
| We are beginning to see the movement splinter into its constituent parts. | |
| And then, Zach, if you would just walk us through the six pictures that I had sent to you, beginning with the nature picture. | |
| These are all screenshots of tweets from the last day or two. | |
| This is Nature Magazine, one of the two biggest, most important preeminent science journals in the world, saying that they are going to be joining Shut Down STEM. | |
| Striking for Black Lives is one of the taglines that People have become convinced this is what it's about. | |
| Next, from Science, the Editor-in-Chief of Science says, Science and scientists must say out loud that they have benefited from and failed to acknowledge white supremacy. | |
| Next, one of many societies, professional societies, this happens to be the Society for Research and Child Development, is saying shut down academia and genuflecting before the new gods. | |
| Four, we have some academics with their version of, well, what they actually say is, looking forward to shut down STEM and having conversations with my students tomorrow about racism and academia. | |
| As folks who hold any power in academia, it is our responsibility to disrupt the system and take responsibility for our ongoing contributions to systemic oppression. | |
| I read this as, don't hurt me, please move along, nothing to see here. | |
| Five, this craziness from an academic. | |
| Hat tip to Leigh Jessome for pointing this out to me. | |
| I hope there are a lot of circles in academia having serious conversation on how academic freedom upholds white supremacy, racism, and prejudice. | |
| Yep. | |
| And finally, six, we have a PhD student, Zachary Six, saying, I can't read that. | |
| I'm not sure what it says. | |
| Among other things, she says, the science can wait. | |
| Because obviously, in the middle of a global pandemic, the science can wait. | |
| Well, they have taken pains. | |
| They have learned from the accusation that there's something untoward about mass protests when we should be social distancing. | |
| And so they have taken pains to exclude work on COVID-19 from their shutdown. | |
| They didn't even at first though. | |
| They've added that in. | |
| They've added paragraphs. | |
| Maybe they got some immediate pushback. | |
| There's a bunch to say here, but I really think the most important thing we can do, and we have to make sure to do a good job of it before we're done here today, is to give people a sense for what they are actually seeing. | |
| Because almost all of this is euphemistic and not straightforward, it's Potemkin, it's not to be taken at face value, and frankly, there are two experiences for us. | |
| That are happening simultaneously. | |
| On the one hand, we are having a large number of people wake up to the fact that what they saw happen to us at Evergreen is part of something much larger, as we tried to warn them. | |
| And so, on the one hand, that's reassuring that at least we are not in a tiny group of people who see it. | |
| Many more people are seeing it this week than last, for example. | |
| But there is also this increasingly frustrating sense that we lived through this in order to make it possible to avoid having this takeover civilization. | |
| In other words, I feel like we paid a high price, at least in terms of our security in the world. | |
| We were tossed into a completely unknown realm and we are still there. | |
| We're doing fine, but We had tenured jobs now. | |
| We're here on the internet trying to figure out what our new job is. | |
| So, in some sense this was all for naught. | |
| We went through this. | |
| We, you know, we had the police withdrawn from a riot against us and we watched the community patrols descend immediately into violence. | |
| We know what happens when you shut down the police. | |
| And, I must say, as much as it was surprising to see Jamil talking so openly and on camera about his feeling that STEM was the problem, I can't remember the first instance, but somewhere in the year prior to Evergreen's meltdown, I remember, it may have been in a faculty meeting, I remember | |
| Saying something about that what was unfolding was a challenge to Enlightenment values and that we academics had an obligation to defend them and I remember being stunned To hear an attack on Enlightenment values come back right not just the Enlightenment right but Enlightenment values and You know at first I would it was I understand to be rigor and logic in combination with compassion for the humanity of all people | |
| Right. | |
| You know, maybe that's a sort of stricto lato, that's a really broad interpretation, and a more narrow interpretation is just maybe about logic and rigor and using science to understand what we do in the world. | |
| But even so, even so, those are the values that you're fighting back against? | |
| It was stunning to me. | |
| I didn't think anybody could marshal such a broken argument in public and not have, you know, a faculty assembled for a faculty meeting erupt in people saying, wait, no, you don't have that right. | |
| You haven't understood what enlightenment values are then because you couldn't possibly be attacking them. | |
| But it was just silence, right? | |
| People are scared. | |
| That is the thing people need to understand, is that at some level, we've said in other contexts, that frequently you will understand what people are doing better if you turn down the sound, because we humans can't help but process language, and if you listen to what people say they are doing, Then you will often be misled if what they are doing is not the same thing. | |
| And so you have lots of people who are saying that they are looking forward to talking about bias in the sciences. | |
| Okay. | |
| There's nothing wrong with talking about bias in the sciences. | |
| It exists. | |
| And it has a long and dark history. | |
| Agreed. | |
| I mean, certainly up through the end of the 19th century, it was actually a primarily not just white and male endeavor, but also sort of a landed white and male endeavor. | |
| It was for rich people, and those rich people tended to be men, and those rich people tended to be white. | |
| What has happened in the 20th century, in part, is an opening up across all of those demographic categories. | |
| Obviously, I have benefited from it being open to women, but I think more so everyone, effectively, who's doing science today has benefited from it no longer being just appropriate for the landed gentry, right? | |
| This is now actually open to anyone. | |
| There's a move away from that now. | |
| We've talked a little bit about the problems in modern science before, but the fact that In theory, you can get yourself into college and get through and become a scientist no matter where you came from is wholly different from anything that was true of the Western scientific tradition up until, I don't know, at least the turn of the 19th to 20th century. | |
| Yeah, the door is wide open, which doesn't mean people are walking through it in numbers that are proportional to their numbers in the population, and it is certainly worth talking about why that isn't the case and what might be done about it. | |
| I think it would be wonderful if people did show up in numbers that were proportional, but nonetheless. | |
| If you're scratching your head, if this is the first time you've heard enlightenment values challenged, or, I mean, please understand. | |
| Shut down STEM is a new kind of tactic. | |
| I tried to get somebody to tell me if this tactic had a name, and a lot of people came up with things that were in the ballpark, but nobody has come up with a description. | |
| The thing about shutdown stem, and it works the same way for defund the police, is that these terms are basically a floating point variable. | |
| Shut down STEM could mean what people presumably at science think they're doing when they use their platform to broadcast this stuff, that we are shutting down for a day, symbolically, to acknowledge that there's been some bias, right? | |
| But imagine that you were sitting somewhere and you thought, how can we demonstrate our power? | |
| Let's get the very top echelon of science to broadcast hashtag shutdown stem, right? | |
| And then you realize that those same people who seek this kind of power are also actually broadcasting the message that science itself is the problem. | |
| That, I mean, you heard their language. | |
| That white supremacy is baked in. | |
| Baked in. | |
| Baked into science. | |
| Think about how preposterous a claim this is. | |
| Scientific method, you observe a pattern, you hypothesize a possible explanation, you come up with some predictions that would be true if the hypothesis was correct, and then you run a test, right? | |
| But they're pretending that the scientific method is something like, you observe a pattern, you come up with some explanation that blames black people, and then you broadcast it without checking, right? | |
| Now, has science been done badly? | |
| A lot? | |
| Sure. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| Has some of that bad science been done badly in service of racist goals? | |
| Yes. | |
| Is that happening in the last 20 years? | |
| I don't see any evidence of it, and we've gone looking, actually. | |
| Even if it is. | |
| You know, 50 years even, right? | |
| And that's not to say that this isn't pretty recent history, and that there hasn't been a lot of, frankly, evil done in the guise of, in the uniform of science. | |
| But that doesn't make it science. | |
| But just like hashtag Black Lives Matter is cloaking itself in something that sounds honorable and amazing and is not actually that inside, the idea that eugenics or social Darwinism is actually a scientific study, it's not. | |
| It's the same misapprehension. | |
| But even if it was, let's transport ourselves back 50 or 100 years, right? | |
| The cure for bad science is good science, and it always has been. | |
| Science is a bias correction mechanism. | |
| That's really the only thing it does. | |
| You don't need science to tell you things that are obvious. | |
| You need science to tell you things that are counterintuitive, which means that whatever your biases are, science is the tool for addressing them. | |
| And I would say further, Let's imagine, so if you listen to the leaders of the movement, and you listen to what their internal conversation sounds like, they say, look, white supremacy is so baked in that you have to level the institution and replace it with something else. | |
| And sometimes they will say something Afrocentric, right? | |
| Now let's suppose for a moment that there was some other system that was interested in what's true, that's what science is about, what's true, and it was self-correcting, which is the beauty of science, the thing that separates it from every other method. | |
| Let's suppose that you did have an alternative method, all the better if it comes from Africa, lovely, okay? | |
| So you've got some other method that is both self-correcting and interested in the truth. | |
| What will happen to it if you set it in motion? | |
| It will converge on Enlightenment science. | |
| That's what it'll do. | |
| At this point in a global economy it will. | |
| And we know that there have been other Enlightenments. | |
| You know the Enlightenment that we talk about when we refer to it is the European Enlightenment. | |
| But the Maya, as we have talked about before, the Maya had an enlightenment many hundreds of years before the Europeans did. | |
| And although we know very little about what their inner workings of their thinking was, because almost their entire library was destroyed, in fact, by the Spaniards when they arrived, although the Maya themselves were already a culture in decline at the point that the Spaniards arrived. | |
| What we do know is that they had astronomers, they had scribes, they had a concept of zero, they had mathematics, they had vast written literature, they had an enlightenment. | |
| Advanced agricultural chemistry? | |
| So, I don't even want to put caveats on it though. | |
| You need two characteristics to guarantee that all you have to add is time before you rediscover science, right? | |
| It doesn't matter what the nature of a truth-seeking, self-correcting mechanism is, it will inevitably land there. | |
| And what that means is that the right thing to do, if you really want to empower black people, and believe me, I do, If you really want to do that, the best thing you can do is you can arm them with the tools of science rather than setting us back hundreds of years and waiting for some other method to converge on discoveries we've already got. | |
| You can arm them, you can democratize these tools, which is exactly what we were doing at Evergreen. | |
| It is exactly why they had to come for us. | |
| Now this is the part that I think people are going to be totally bewildered by. | |
| Why, if this movement is so interested in empowering black people, would it attack a tool that was really their best weapon in order to end whatever oppression remains? | |
| And here's the reason. | |
| This movement isn't what it looks like. | |
| This movement is a false version of something that doesn't exist to be found in large numbers. | |
| In other words, the energy has been captured by people who are not well-intentioned, and the reason that they hate science is because science is a good mechanism for figuring out what's true, and what they are peddling is not true. | |
| So the last thing they want is people empowered to check their claims because their claims don't stand up. | |
| And we saw this all over the Evergreen debacle, right? | |
| When we said, OK, you're telling us that there is racism at Evergreen. | |
| Where's the evidence? | |
| And what did they say? | |
| They said, to ask for evidence of racism is racism with a capital R. Now that's obviously a preposterous circular bit of logic, but the idea... And even more precisely, to ask for evidence of racism is evidence of racism. | |
| Yep. | |
| So it's inescapable. | |
| It's hermetically sealed by design. | |
| So now think about what you've seen. | |
| You've seen tens of thousands of people in the street marching behind banners that seem superficially like they might be pointed in the direction of something good, but are actually Trojan horses hiding something else. | |
| Most of them don't know they're carrying Trojan horses, I don't think. | |
| They have no idea. | |
| And even the ones, so you point to some of the tweets that people are, you said that they are basically saying, don't hurt me. | |
| That's certainly a component of it, but there's something far more insidious here. | |
| When these people, they see the mob coming, they look at their skin, they say, uh-oh, I don't want to be backed against the wall. | |
| And they figure out what you have to say in order not to get backed against the wall to get the mob to move on to somebody else. | |
| A, they are externalizing harm onto the next person, right? | |
| They have an obligation to stand up, and by not standing up, they make the mob stronger, and then the next person that backs against the wall has an even bigger problem, right? | |
| So this is not cool. | |
| But, The worst part of it, and we've seen it hundreds of times, is the individual says this thing to get the mob to leave them alone, and then they've got a problem. | |
| How the hell are you going to sleep after you've done that? | |
| Right? | |
| So what do they do? | |
| They tell themselves that it's true. | |
| Right? | |
| They forget what they knew, and they tell themselves this is actually the right thing, that's why I did it. | |
| And so now the point is, the mob didn't just move on, it actually captured their minds. | |
| Right? | |
| Now, the reason that people like us We're so animated after the evergreen meltdown was that we saw this force take over lots and lots of people who should know better. | |
| And after it took them over, there was no place, there was no place that you could say it stops here, which is why I said in that clip what I said, it's why I said the same thing to Congress, right? | |
| This is going to eventually spill over into anything now. | |
| Truth be told, I'm impressed at the speed. | |
| But nonetheless, the mechanism was obvious, and well, anyway, it is very important that you think, what is the most parsimonious explanation for what I'm seeing? | |
| Is this an honest confusion about whether science is a good thing, or is this a demonstration of power? | |
| Yeah. | |
| And it is. | |
| It's a demonstration of power. | |
| Let me show another screen, Zach, my computer. | |
| This is the Particles for Justice site, which is the site that actually began, I believe, the hashtag to, God, I've even forgotten what they're calling it now, So, Strike for Black Lives with the now-familiar Black Power Fist, but this strikes me as particularly important. | |
| So, this is put together by some particle physicists, including one who I'll say a few more words about here shortly. | |
| This paragraph here, Therefore, as physicists, we believe an academic strike is urgently needed to hit pause, to give black academics a break, and to give others an opportunity to reflect on their own complicity in anti-black racism in academia and their local and global communities. | |
| This is where it gets interesting, I think. | |
| This hashtag strike for black lives is in dialogue with a call from colleagues in astronomy to hashtag shutdown STEM and hashtag shutdown academia for at least the day of June 10th. | |
| There it is, right? | |
| So, you know, there's there's Mont and Bailey all over the place, right? | |
| And you you referred to one explicitly in the last live stream. | |
| But for those few people who will stand up to this, you can take it down now, Zach. | |
| They will be told, look, can't you stop what you're doing for one day? | |
| Just one day. | |
| Don't you care about black lives that much? | |
| And the most important thing is what you were just saying, that no, this isn't actually what it appears. | |
| This is not actually in service of ending racism. | |
| That is not what is going on here. | |
| Although many of the people who are participating think it's what's going on here. | |
| Those two things can simultaneously be true, and they are. | |
| But just like defund the police, oh, we don't mean defund, we just mean don't put new funds too. | |
| Oh, we don't mean abolish, but actually they do, or at least some of them do. | |
| Same thing with, it's a one-day strike, come on, can't you get behind that? | |
| What are you, racist? | |
| Well, let's shut down STEM and shut down academia for at least the day of June 10th. | |
| Let me say just a couple more things. | |
| One of the instigators of this particular madness is an astrophysicist or a particle physicist who wrote this piece Zachary. | |
| Chanda Prescott Weinstein, or Weinstein, no relation, in response to the James Damore memo, the Google memo that came out in August 2017, and we can do a whole other live stream about that, we won't do that here, in which the headline that Slate gave her was, Stop equating science with truth. | |
| And it's exactly the piece that you would expect, given that. | |
| Um, to which I responded, uh, let's see, Zach, take down my screen for a moment while I find it. | |
| Um, I responded, here you go. | |
| Um, In an essay in Quillette, should we stop equating science with truth? | |
| No. | |
| So, you know, it was a short essay. | |
| No, actually not. | |
| It was more than that, but let me just share a couple of things that I said there, just a couple of lines. | |
| Quote, shutting down dissent is a classic authoritarian move and will not result in less oppression. | |
| You will send the dissenters underground and they will seek truth without you. | |
| Science and scientists need to respond. | |
| The truth is not, in and of itself, oppressive. | |
| To the extent that selection has produced differences between groups, such as differences in interests between men and women, denying the reality of that truth is hardly a legitimate response. | |
| So that is in reference, of course, to the DeMoore memo, which, no, did not claim that men and women are definitely abled. | |
| Even. | |
| He just claimed. | |
| You can take it down, Zach. | |
| He just made the observation, which is backed by empirical science, that given free choice, men and women tend to make somewhat different choices about what they're interested in and what they want to do on average between populations. | |
| Anyway. | |
| So, I want to try to orient people to our perspective. | |
| Obviously, you hit the nail on the head in your article. | |
| That would have been in 2017. | |
| Yeah. | |
| So, okay, that's interesting. | |
| You and I have both predicted the future and it has arrived quickly and in very dramatic form. | |
| But what I want to point out is the philosophy of science. | |
| is actually applicable to this not explicitly scientific discussion. | |
| Science has you hypothesize the explanation for a pattern and then make a prediction and test it. | |
| The purpose of that exercise is not the testing of prediction. | |
| Scientific experiment is not the sine qua non of science. | |
| The important thing is that the hypothesis, the model of reality that generates the prediction, gets credit for the prediction when it turns out to be true, or in technical language, it remains unfalsified despite test. | |
| Yeah. | |
| So what that means is that when you've got a true prediction, you should look at the model that generated it and say, that model appears to be somewhere in the ballpark of correct. | |
| What else does it say? | |
| That's the important part. | |
| What else does it say? | |
| So just make sure, you know, you have to be very careful that your predictions not just inherently followed from the model, but that there weren't other models that made the same predictions, right? | |
| You have to be careful in both directions. | |
| So there are lots of things that tell you the quality of a prediction. | |
| So one of the things that tells you the quality of a prediction is if it's unique to the hypothesis in question, or does it reflect well on several hypotheses at once. | |
| Another one would be, is it counterintuitive? | |
| If a prediction is intuitive, then it's not a very strong test. | |
| If a prediction is wildly counterintuitive, then it's a great test when it shows up. | |
| So for example, Einstein's prediction that the light of stars would be or that light is bent by gravity which is then tested by the observation that the Sun bends the light of distant stars which is something you can't observe directly and so we don't know it to be true. | |
| You can only see it during an eclipse when the Sun is darkened, but the starlight behind it is still visible, so you can detect this gravitational lensing, right? | |
| That's an amazing prediction because, A, it's so strange to imagine that gravity is going to bend light. | |
| Nobody would think to predict it. | |
| It's really counterintuitive. | |
| And the second thing is that it's very easily demonstrated, so you're easy to check. | |
| Yeah, so the more people are surprised by a prediction and who think it's not true, the riskier the prediction, as it were. | |
| Actually, if it is borne out, the better a test it has actually been of the hypothesis in question. | |
| When you have two predictions of a hypothesis, both of which inevitably follow from that hypothesis and they do not follow from any other hypotheses, If you have a risky prediction and a non-risky prediction, you can test the non-risky prediction, but it is not nearly as strong a test of the hypothesis than testing the risky prediction. | |
| Yeah, it reflects weakly positively on the hypothesis, whereas a deeply counterintuitive, totally unique prediction reflects strongly on it. | |
| But here's the point. | |
| Now we have a thing that's not an explicitly scientific kind of prediction, right? | |
| You predicted the future, I predicted the future, Eric has predicted the future. | |
| So many times. | |
| Right. | |
| The point is, the real question is, okay, how are you doing that? | |
| Do you have a time machine? | |
| Or do you have a model that tells you what's really going on, so that where other people are caught off guard, you actually see it ahead of time? | |
| And if so, what else does your model say? | |
| That's the real question. | |
| And so, I hate to be the one saying that, because I am among the people who have predicted this event would happen. | |
| But nonetheless, the important question then is, alright, who got this one right? | |
| Shouldn't we be elevating them in the conversation? | |
| It's not just us, it's also Glenn Lowry, it's John McWhirter, it's... It's those guys you already mentioned, the Grievance Studies, Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, lots of academics actually, you know, and across a number of domains. | |
| Who have increasingly been saying, wait a minute, hold up, Jordan Peterson, obviously, probably most powerfully for effectively saying, what would it have been, 2016, 2015, basically standing up against compelled speech. | |
| He wasn't standing up against trans people. | |
| He actually, I know this to be true as you do, has nothing against trans people, real trans people, who are real but very, very, very, very, very rare. | |
| He was standing up against compelled speech, the idea that if you do not speak the way that we now speak, that we have now agreed to speak, you are breaking the law. | |
| No, no, we don't agree to that. | |
| We do not. | |
| And he he correctly predicted that Bill C-16 would result in people having their liberty threatened if they did not use particular language. | |
| And this has now happened. | |
| A father has been instructed on what he is to call his own child in the confines of his own home. | |
| Right. | |
| So Jordan Peterson was right. | |
| That means, hey, Jordan Peterson now has credit in the bank with respect to his model, whatever it may be. | |
| Right? | |
| Who doesn't have credit? | |
| Well, Ezra Klein blew it! | |
| Ezra Klein was busy rationalizing that a lot of the things we hear people saying they don't really mean and what we are to imagine that they mean something much more benign and they're just venting. | |
| Well, that doesn't turn out to be the case. | |
| These things... It probably is true for some of them, again, right? | |
| But the fact that it's true for some of them does not mean that the movement isn't incredibly powerful Even if it starts, as all movements will, as a tiny niche thing over in some made-up fields. | |
| Made-up fields, I want to say, they claim to be in humanities and social sciences, but they don't deserve that title. | |
| The humanities are real and necessary to a full and rich understanding of the human experience. | |
| The study of literature, the study of history, the study of philosophy, these are real and necessary fields when done right, and there are many ways to do them right. | |
| But almost everything that ends in studies is not that. | |
| So let's talk for a second about Chanda Prescott wine. | |
| I'm going to assume it's Weinstein. | |
| Just put her over with Harvey and be done with it. | |
| I won't say that, but I will say I don't want any association with her nonsense. | |
| But the fact is, we are not going to end up disbanding science, but this shutdown STEM thing is So again, a Mott and Bailey would have two versions, right? | |
| You would have a strong version and then a retreat position that was secure, right? | |
| So the strong version is there's some massive problem with science and we need to transform it into something new. | |
| And then the weak version is, can't you just shut down for a day to acknowledge that it hasn't all been hunky-dory race-wise in science in the past, right? | |
| That retreat position is not wrong, but the point is, It wouldn't be wrong if this was actually what it was claiming to be. | |
| Right. | |
| But the idea, what would it cost if you were trying to corrupt Science Magazine, right? | |
| Now, Science Magazine is already corrupt, but if you were trying to corrupt it to your own ends and you wanted to get it to broadcast a hashtag of your choosing, right? | |
| That reflected some bias of yours. | |
| The price point would be astronomically high, right? | |
| Science would be very good at resisting anything that you try to bring into their office and disguise as something lovely just to get them to broadcast it to enrich you. | |
| Okay, this movement has actually managed to get Science Magazine to broadcast shut down STEM, right? | |
| Like if you asked me what would you have to do to get Science Magazine to broadcast a call to shut down STEM, I would say it's impossible, but for the fact that at this moment you have I hate to say it, I know there are renegades among the millennials. | |
| We've taught them for years. | |
| Almost all of our students are millennials and almost all of them were actually amazing and interested in truth and interested in discomfort if it allowed them a better model of the world. | |
| It's easy to paint a brush across an entire generation. | |
| It is mostly the millennials who are protesting on the streets. | |
| And rioting on the streets. | |
| But we know, we know that there are a tremendous number of people who are born into that generation who are capable of simultaneously valuing rationality and compassion. | |
| Well, on the one hand the streets are everything and on the other hand they're nothing. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Okay? | |
| What's going on in the streets is part of a larger plan, right? | |
| So somebody, one of the people who I'm in dialogue with on Twitter responded to my question about is there a name for this floating point variable term that allows you to, you know, move a slider around with respect to what do you mean by shutdown? | |
| Is that one day or is that permanently and completely, right? | |
| Can I just interrupt? | |
| So you're looking for something that basically, Mont and Bailey is a binary, right? | |
| And you're looking for the continuous version of a Mont and Bailey. | |
| The continuous variable where a mob of a thousand people, each person can set the slider where they're comfortable with it and they can all move together towards this goal. | |
| And then, you know, the amazing aggressive position wins in the end because all of these people have advocated, thinking they're advocating for They're right level anyway one of the people that I'm in dialogue with suggested something I've never heard of before called above and below which There's not much evidence of this discussion online, but there's a little it's apparently affiliated with communism although I won't be surprised if it's more general than this, but it has to do with Affiliated with the people who identify as communists or people who are fighting communism? | |
| No, no. | |
| Identify with communism. | |
| It has to do with basically using, creating a mob to create the impression of demand for some kind of change. | |
| And then using that impression of a mob that is demanding change to get elected officials and things to capitulate to the public, right? | |
| It's sort of like a pseudo-populist thing. | |
| I mean, the public, if you told the public, no, actually, we're really interested in shutting down science, you know, they'd look at you like you were crazy. | |
| Yeah. | |
| I mean, it is crazy. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Some account with zero followers, which could be a sock puppet or it could be somebody who's afraid and so has made a new account, tweeted something like, how ironic to broadcast hashtag shutdown stem from your super sophisticated cell phone. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Right. | |
| I mean, it is pretty ironic. | |
| But in any case, we've got We've got a power grab that has a game theoretic mechanism for using whatever power it has to marshal more and more force. | |
| The important thing is not the street. | |
| The street is like a demonstration of the amount of energy, and the amount of energy We know it's happening at the New York Times. | |
| institutions and topple them from within. | |
| So I think the real story, which we are not seeing while we are paying attention to the street, is inside of every single institution of a certain size, there is a mirror of what's going on in the street taking place. | |
| The New York Times. | |
| We know it's happening at the New York Times. | |
| Barry Weiss has talked about it. | |
| Well, but I mean, we've also now seen, you know, they've, the firings have begun. | |
| The firings have begun. | |
| And I don't have it. | |
| I won't be able to pull it up, so I'm going to paraphrase. | |
| But there is something from the new editor in – boy, I didn't pull this up. | |
| I don't know if it's the editor-in-chief who's been replaced, as well as the editor of the editorial section, or just the editorial section. | |
| One of the new editors has basically said to his entire staff, if you see anything, anything at all, that strikes you as not quite fitting with what we're trying to do here at the New York Times, you let me know. | |
| It's, uh, if you see something, say something. | |
| If you see something, say something. | |
| And, uh, it is, you know, it is again, simultaneously like, please, I'm on the right side, please don't hurt me. | |
| Um, but it's, it's encouraging. | |
| It's encouraging people to start reporting out on their neighbors and, uh, and their family members. | |
| You know, just it, we know where this goes from here. | |
| We know where this goes, but imagine that you could peer into these institutions. | |
| Imagine that you were at Science Magazine. | |
| Now, we don't know anything about what happened in Science Magazine other than something happened that caused Science Magazine to broadcast, shut down STEM, and to stop doing anything else for the day, right? | |
| We know that the movement, when you talk to it directly, is very clear on the fact that it's not that they want to reform STEM, they actually find STEM to be their enemy, and we can infer why that is. | |
| So imagine, the Millennials, right, were Gen X. | |
| Gen X is a tiny generation. | |
| It is now sort of upper echelon in these institutions, right? | |
| Just by virtue of seniority. | |
| Well, the boomers are still more senior, but... They're more senior, but they're also pretty old, right? | |
| And so anyway, there's a lot of Gen X at the top, but it's not very large in numbers. | |
| I actually don't think that Gen X is yet heading up admins. | |
| I think it's still boomers who are heading up universities and colleges and mainstream media and such. | |
| Well, I would say at the very top. | |
| Anyway, it's an interesting question and it's, you know, it's an empirical question. | |
| But in any case, what you do have is the rank and file in these institutions is millennial. | |
| There are a lot of them. | |
| They are rightly angry. | |
| They've been handed a bad deal. | |
| Terrible deal. | |
| Terrible deal. | |
| So there's a lot of interest in change. | |
| Not much sophistication, I would say, about what change ought to look like. | |
| So it's really just pent-up energy. | |
| Well, they had crap educations at some level. | |
| They did. | |
| You know, just to return to that final point that I made in those 14 points that I made a couple of live streams ago. | |
| Just as you said, they've been handed a terrible deal. | |
| Most of them are in debt, they had terrible educations, they have no chance of owning property, they have terrible healthcare, they've mostly been on legal pharmaceuticals for so much of their lives they don't even know how to order their own moods and their own psychologies or interpret those of others, and they're living online. | |
| And of course they're confused, and of course they're angry. | |
| Well, of course they're angry. | |
| They're a good reason to be angry. | |
| They're angry. | |
| And a movement outdoors that is formally about the murder of a black man but is actually quite obviously about a demand for change has been co-opted by people who are selling a particular phony story about what's wrong and what to do about it. | |
| But anyway, there's a lot of fervor for just signing on because, hey, change is good. | |
| If things suck, change is good. | |
| Now, that's not true. | |
| Change, I mean, you know, the problem, a lot of, if you're now listening to us because we correctly predicted what was going to happen, then our current conversation is, well, we told you this looked Maoist. | |
| Now project that thing to the scale of nations and you know why this is Preoccupying us, but inside of science, right? | |
| Some battle presumably took place where a bunch of people who have behind them as they approach the question of whether or not to shut down one of the premier science journals for the day and turn it into a megaphone for the George Floyd protests, right? | |
| They have images on every screen of violent unrest in cities across the nation and increasingly across the world, right? | |
| So that seems like a reason to listen, and for the kind of cowards who end up in administrative positions in large institutions, and frankly, it's a lot of cowards. | |
| Not entirely. | |
| We've known a few non-cowardly administrators, but… And they're going to be first against the wall. | |
| Well, at Evergreen, one of them was. | |
| Yep. | |
| Before us. | |
| He was gotten rid of first, Michael Zimmerman. | |
| Indeed. | |
| Michael Zimmerman, who was the… Very courageous. | |
| Very courageous provost, was shoved out by George Bridges before the madness unfolded. | |
| I mean, he would have been in opposition to it all the way along. | |
| So they got rid of him for the same reason they got rid of us. | |
| So anyway, the courageous people are going to get tossed out. | |
| That's just what happens. | |
| And then the institutions are going to topple into the hands of this thing, right? | |
| Where does Chanda Prescott Weinstein end up after physics has been brought to its knees? | |
| I think she's one of our new top physicists. | |
| Why? | |
| Because there aren't enough black physicists, which is probably true. | |
| And we, you know, and you say this, we say this, I at least have no idea what the value, what the rigor of her science is. | |
| I have no idea. | |
| But she is clearly one effect of this will be to win in a system that is supposed to be about merit, but in which she will win based on her lineage or the color of her skin. | |
| This is the kind of science that we had in the 19th century. | |
| It's a different lineage that's winning now, but it is exactly what was going on then, and it is not legitimate. | |
| It is not okay. | |
| So, at some level, I worry about just repeating it so much that it gets lost, but I've been saying from the beginning that part of the problem here is that there are two movements fused together. | |
| There are people who earnestly want change in a realm where it is necessary, who would love to end oppression. | |
| And then there is a cynical, self-interested movement that wants to turn the tables of oppression. | |
| And it doesn't turn the tables of oppression on people who are actually oppressing. | |
| It takes these very crude demographic measures of whether or not you benefited from or paid the price of some kind of historical oppression, and then it just simply rank orders our new role in the world. | |
| And it's preposterous, it's incoherent, it's dangerous, it functions like a cult, but The power, I think the problem is the power of this perspective is in no way correlated with the accuracy of the portrayal. | |
| So you have something that is a fairy tale that is marching forward on the basis as if it was the literal truth and it is going to line us up against the wall, it is going to topple the institutions suddenly, it is going to be understandable that The people at Science Magazine, the people at Nature, the people at the AAAS, all of the people who have broadcast shut down STEM are going to discover what that actually means. | |
| Too late to do anything about it. | |
| So this seems a decent moment to introduce just a few short quotes from Orwell's book I don't think actually, and we've talked about this elsewhere, that we are mostly living in a 1984 moment. | |
| This looks more Huxleyan. | |
| It looks more like Brave New World. | |
| But both Orwell and Huxley had their finger on the pulse of what authoritarian and totalitarian movements look like. | |
| I just think that Brave New World is a little bit more accurate in its predictions of what the world is that we're actually moving towards. | |
| But here's from 1984, which was published first in 1949. | |
| Quote, "'For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four, or that the force of gravity works, or that the past is unchangeable? | |
| If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable, what then?' So that's predicting postmodernism. | |
| Next quote from Orwell. | |
| Every record has been destroyed or falsified. | |
| Every book has been rewritten. | |
| Every statue and street and building has been renamed. | |
| Every date has altered in the process, and that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. | |
| History has stopped. | |
| And finally, another quote from 1984: "The party seeks power entirely for its own sake. | |
| We are not interested in the good of others, we are interested solely in power, pure power. | |
| What pure power means you will understand presently. | |
| We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. | |
| All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. | |
| The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. | |
| They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. | |
| We are not like that. | |
| We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. | |
| Power is not a means, it is an end. | |
| One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution. | |
| One makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. | |
| The object of persecution is persecution. | |
| The object of torture is torture. | |
| The object of power is power. | |
| Now you begin to understand. | |
| That's Orwell in 1949. | |
| That's 71 years ago. | |
| 71 years ago, yeah. | |
| And he really needed an Ezra Klein to explain why he was overreacting, I guess. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | |
| It's amazing, and you know, you're right. | |
| I hadn't thought about it until now, but Orwell does predict postmodernism. | |
| That's what Newspeak is, right? | |
| It's a completely nonsensical language that inverts reality. | |
| And I mean, so this is maybe not nearly as interesting in light of what Orwell said, but there was an insane piece that came out today, yesterday, in the Independent, which has its headline changed, but the original headline was So this is about the kerfuffle in which J.K. | |
| Rowling comes out with the insane stance that sex is real and that men and women are different. | |
| And of course all of her... So many people are falling all over themselves again to say, don't hurt me, don't hurt me. | |
| Of course I deny biological reality. | |
| So can I just point out, if you don't think sex is real, you're doing it wrong. | |
| I think you've used that before. | |
| Damn, that's embarrassing. | |
| Maybe not here. | |
| You've just called me out though. | |
| Great. | |
| All right. | |
| My family has gone full woke. | |
| They're now outing what I've said at the dinner table. | |
| That's woke? | |
| Wow. | |
| Okay. | |
| Again, we will talk at some point about the amazing and heroic J.K. | |
| Rowling and what is going on with regards to the responses to her, but one of them is this headline from The Independent, the original headline before it got changed. | |
| What the white supremacist roots of biological sex reveal about today's transphobic feminism. | |
| You know, what can you do? | |
| They're just putting their crazy-ass ideas next to the new movement that no one who hasn't been through this really seems to be able to turn away from. | |
| And you know, we're saying, you need to be not a racist, and you need to be anti-racist, and you also need to reject this. | |
| You need to. | |
| And rejecting it means that you will probably be called a racist. | |
| And that has become, in the 21st century, one of the scariest things to be called. | |
| And until you were called a racist, and until I was called a racist, and the reasons for us being called racist are a matter of public record. | |
| I've published the letter that I wrote, which was this, that you guys are not seeking to end oppression, you're seeking to turn the tables of oppression. | |
| Before you go through that particular looking glass, it seems like it can't be survivable, right? | |
| That you cannot possibly survive someone calling you a racist. | |
| But the fact is, someone saying that word about you, or a Nazi, or transphobe, or you know, whatever number of these ridiculous epithets are being used now, it feels like it's unrecoverable, and like you won't ever be able to recover from it. | |
| But the fact is that if it's just wrong, Assuming you're not, as the vast majority of people aren't racist, or a Nazi, or a transphobe, or any of this other ridiculousness, then you do survive and you emerge going, huh, that didn't kill me. | |
| Being called that did not turn out to do the damage that they thought it would do. | |
| I have never been less happy to disagree with you than I am right now. | |
| Okay. | |
| I disagree with you. | |
| I think that perspective is now out of date as of a couple of weeks ago. | |
| Okay, so you think it was true when we were going through what we went through, but it's not true now? | |
| Well, I think there was a way in which it was true. | |
| I don't think it was safe, but I think there was a way to jump. | |
| But I think what we are now seeing is happening at a scale and with the ferocity that we are now back in a landscape where the hazard of saying what's true is high. | |
| And that's putting people in a predicament where they're going to have to make a real choice. | |
| It's not simple. | |
| But there's no winning if you lie. | |
| Oh. | |
| Right? | |
| If you do this like, please don't hurt me, or I'm going to do everything I can to signal how woke I am, it's not like they won't come for you anyway. | |
| Right. | |
| They will. | |
| There's nothing you can do to appease the mob. | |
| There's nothing that you can do that's sufficient. | |
| And the bigger your profile, the more true that is. | |
| I'm not arguing that this is a difficult choice. | |
| I mean, in fact, I was in dialogue with Robbie George yesterday, and we were both Remarking on the fact that people see standing up to the mob as courageous, but that actually there There's certain ways that you could be wired that it's just there isn't a choice right and I feel this way For me for sure. | |
| It was like people say I'm so glad you you stood up and you didn't Kowtow to the mob and it was like well I can't I so can't relate to what that would have been like that it's you know it was automatic but but what I would say is. | |
| Look, you are going to be offered a choice, whether you're going to stand up or whether you're going to become complicit with and then part of this mob. | |
| And the problem is, I can't say that you will end up winning if you say the right thing. | |
| This is a frightening moment. | |
| We are watching something with revolutionary potential and it's telling us what it wants. | |
| And it's a frightening redo of some of the worst episodes in history. | |
| What I can say is if you do the right thing, you will definitely feel better about it. | |
| And although the number of people who will interact with you, who will talk to you, may shrink dramatically, and the vileness of things that are said to you and about you may go up, You will join the ranks of the courageous and the intelligent. | |
| People who have both of those characteristics are going to end up separated from everybody else by the willingness or the necessity to stand up and say what's true in the face of this nonsense. | |
| And they won't think like you in every other way. | |
| And that's important and good. | |
| But the number of people whom we now know, whom we can now see, and who are now known to us, in the wake of what happened at Evergreen three years ago, who are both intelligent and courageous, and who hold no truck with this nonsense, is large. | |
| Yeah, I'm concerned a little bit. | |
| I've seen people decry the idea of the right side of history, as if there's something defective about that claim, as if it's cultish to even imagine that such a thing exists. | |
| I regard this as nonsense. | |
| There is a right side to history. | |
| It is not always obvious to those engaged in its unfolding which side the right side is. | |
| Well, that's not to say that every interaction between two groups has a right side, right? | |
| You're not making that claim. | |
| But there are times when they're just simply the right side and we all know what some of them are. | |
| But the point is, what would you do? | |
| You know, it's very easy to look at the Nazis and know what the right side of history was. | |
| No one imagines they were a member of the German citizenry. | |
| Right. | |
| No one behaved that way, of course. | |
| But the point is to say, look, there was a right side and it was right then and it's right now and it will be right forever. | |
| And so the question is, how do you restructure yourself so that when that moment comes, you'll be on the right side? | |
| That's a valid question, even if you can't say I'm in possession of the knowledge of which one the right side is when something important happens. | |
| You do want to be on the right side of history. | |
| And in this case, if you are paying attention, I believe it is clear which the right side of history is. | |
| And the thing that is so heartbreaking is that it is not obvious that's going to be the winning side here. | |
| That's the question. | |
| We can ask you. | |
| Join us on the right side of history. | |
| It's clear enough. | |
| We cannot say join us on the winning side of history, because frankly, the people on the right side of history at the moment are pretty scared at what they're seeing. | |
| So this was a choice for individuals. | |
| And I can say I have no respect for the individual who has a choice, who has enough security to stand up, who doesn't do it. | |
| That person is complicit and they are externalizing harm onto innocent other people. | |
| If you think you're helping black people by shutting down STEM, You have not understood what's going on. | |
| Science is the key to avoiding bias. | |
| It is the key to escaping oppression. | |
| It is the key to discovering what it is about our system that is systematically biased and eliminating it. | |
| So you are doing black people no favor by challenging that mechanism. | |
| The question is, do you have the intelligence to see where we are? | |
| And do you have the fortitude to stand up to this nonsense and say, no, I won't be party to it. | |
| And if you do, then welcome. | |
| And all I can say is we will do our best to fight to turn this situation around. | |
| Let's hope we win. | |
| All right, we have reached an hour. | |
| There is of course a ton more to say. | |
| I know you had a great deal more that you wanted to say and I did too, but there are live streams in the future. | |
| So what we will do now is we will take a 15-minute break. | |
| We will return to the link that will be in the description of this video. | |
| We will answer your Super Chat questions and I guess that's it. |