#57: Big Game, and the Women Who Hunted It (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 57th in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we discuss the state of the world though an evolutionary lens. DarkHorse merchandise now available at: store.darkhorsepodcast.com Find more from us on Bret’s website (https://bretweinstein.net) or Heather’s website (http://heatherheying.com). Become a member of the DarkHorse LiveStreams, and get access to an additional Q&A livestream every month. Join at Heather's Pat...
- Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream, our 637th, is that correct?
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57?
It is 57.
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We have four topics, and although neither of us really love to do this, we should start at the top of the hour by saying what we did last week, at the point that it was only 24 hours old, that there's now merch available, including the title of last week's episode, Your Algorithm's No Good Here, on t-shirts, hopefully on hats at some point, although that takes some embroidery.
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I did.
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Yes, indeed.
I'm using the they simply to preserve their pronouns, because they don't go by they.
No, they don't.
No.
All right, so we want to talk about big game hunting in pre-Columbian America.
Whether or not when you say something with anger or with love or with any kind of emotion, it changes whether or not the thing itself is true.
Let's see, we want to ask what the game theory behind bailout funds for Not alt-right, man.
for rioters in Portland might be and how that's playing out.
And then finally, and perhaps for a lot of the time here today, we're going to wonder and then investigate whether or not asking questions like that make us alt-right.
You feel all right today?
Not alt-right, man.
The question is far right.
Well, they're both listed there.
Yes, both listed.
All right.
Okay. - Okay.
So it's big game hunting.
Let's do this.
I'm excited for this.
Yeah.
You're excited for me to go out big game hunting and drag home a moose?
Uh, no, I'm excited to discuss whether or not it would make sense for you to go out big game hunting being a woman and all.
A woman and all.
Yes.
I'm not just a woman, I'm a woman and all.
A woman and all, right.
Yep.
Frying up that moose in a pan.
Yeah, it's good though.
It's good though.
All right.
Okay.
Here we go.
Zach, let's show my screen here.
This was published in Science, I think.
It wasn't one of the secondary publications.
I don't know, does Science do that or is that just nature that does that?
I'm confused by Science Advances at the top.
Is that Advances in Science or is Science Advances a thing?
No, it's Science Advances actually.
It is one of the sort of knock-off science magazines.
This was published in November, November 4th of last month, so just a month ago, called Female Hunters of the Early Americas.
And I want to just actually, rather than the abstract, I think in this case the introduction provides a slightly better introduction, rather than the abstract, which is a summary of the whole paper.
So just the first paragraph of the introduction reads as follows.
Big game hunting is an overwhelmingly male-biased behavior among recent hunter-gatherer societies.
Such observations would seem to suggest that this gendered behavioral pattern is an ancestral one, ostensibly stemming from life history traits related to pregnancy and childcare, which constrain female subsistence opportunities.
However, a number of scholars have theorized that such division of labor would have been less pronounced, altogether absent, or structurally different among our early hunter-gatherer ancestors.
And here, incidentally, they have like eight, nine references.
Early subsistence economies that emphasized big game would have encouraged participation from all able individuals.
Alloparenting, which appears to have deep evolutionary roots in the human species, would have freed women of child care demands, allowing them to hunt.
Communal hunting, which also appears to have deep evolutionary roots, would have encouraged contributions from females, males, and children, whether in driving or dispatching large animals.
Moreover, the primary hunting technology of the time, the atlatl or spear thrower, would have encouraged broad participation in big game hunting.
Pooling labor and sharing meat are necessary to mitigate risks associated with the atlatl's low accuracy and long reloading times.
Furthermore, peak proficiency in atlatl use can be achieved at a young age, potentially before females reach reproductive age, obviating a sex-biased technological constraint that would later intensify with bow and arrow technology.
Last, the residentially mobile lifestyle entailed by big game specialization is quite conducive to human reproduction and thus female hunting, contrary to previous thinking, because it reduces net movement relative to central place foraging strategies.
This hypothesis is consistent with high population growth rates among early hunter-gatherer populations.
So, I wanted to read that in part because I wanted to be able to say atlatl a number of times.
Atlatl, yes.
Which I will have more opportunity to say as we proceed.
So, you have not actually spent any time with this paper.
No, I've spent a little time.
Oh, you have, okay.
So, I have a number of things I want to say, but do you have any immediate response?
It's not your first response, but... Yeah, sure.
So, first of all, a number of things.
One, there is, as I'm sure you will get to, a very broad pattern in populations where you have both hunting and gathering.
There is this There's this overwhelming bias towards males doing hunting, or at least big game hunting.
Big game hunting.
Long distance, multi-day hunting.
Right.
And, you know, that's not really in question here.
No, they don't question it.
Right.
Well, nor should they.
The evidence is so overwhelming that this is the general pattern that it just simply is.
In recent hunter-gatherers, right?
Is what they say, right?
The evidence for recent is clear.
They say recent hunter-gatherers, which really just means the extant and those recently enough extant for us to have good evidence.
And so what we have here is sub-fossil evidence.
Sub-fossil meaning it has not been converted to stone.
These are buried remains in the New World, which is independently interesting that the New World may have had different dynamics unfolding.
That suggests a female hunter of big game Now, the place where the rubber meets the road here, as far as I'm concerned, is the nature of the evidence and how justified we are in actually inferring what they have inferred here from it.
So, I think that introduction did not explain the nature of the evidence at all.
Yeah, the nature of the evidence is burial sites.
They've got 27 burial sites.
I think, if memory serves, it's all in the Andes.
Yep, high Andes.
Tropical America at Elevation, which most people wouldn't call tropical, although technically it's tropical, but it's at elevation, so it's not hot and humid.
It's sort of got a temperate climate while being actually really tropical.
So, Andean habitats with 27 burial sites in which a full hunting toolkit was buried alongside people In these 27 burial sites, there are 16 that are men and 11 that are women, which is statistically apparently not a decipherable difference.
So it looks like men and women are equally likely to be buried with a full hunting toolkit, which in other places has been interpreted as evidence that you're buried with the stuff that you used in life.
That is the one big inference here.
Not so fast there, Dr. Haying.
Okay.
Okay.
So, among the things that are worth paying attention to here, here's a thing that if you study paleontology, you will have to grapple with, which is the ability to distinguish a male skeleton from a female skeleton is not nearly the straightforward thing that one would imagine.
That the morphological distinctions that we see in a flesh and blood human are actually not so reliably reflected in skeletal structure that one can simply look at a skeleton and say one way or the other.
Now, if you have... Well, they are looking at not just osteological, they say, but proteomic and isotopic analyses as well.
I know they do, but the question is, what are these kinds of evidence and how good are they, right?
So, A, the skeleton doesn't tell the story in and of itself.
If you have So let me just pause here.
So I did not spend a lot of time considering their evidence.
I spent a lot more time thinking about what it would mean if it were true and therefore how likely it is that it is true.
But super fascinating that you would be arguing that you can't tell based on even just the shape and size, the robust versus gracile nature of male versus female skeletons at the same moment in time.
What sex they are, because, I mean, this is a position that I at least, and I think you, have been very clear on with regard to, you know, this is one of the things that on average is highly, highly different between male and female, but of course those population distributions, males and females at a particular moment in time, are also highly overlapping.
Right, and that's the problem, is that they're overlapping.
If you looked at a large population of skeletons, and in some sense they have a small population of skeletons here, which you cannot assume are equally... So if you had karyotype evidence... Yeah, you know what?
I'm not buying this, because pelvis width alone is highly, highly correlated.
It's highly predictive of sex.
Right, but first of all, there's a reason that, A, I don't think their fossil evidence is so awesome here in terms of quality of these skeletons.
They're archaeological evidence, not fossil.
Right.
Well, sub-fossil anyway, but yes, they're archaeological evidence.
Because I believe, now, you spent more time with this paper than I did.
I breezed through it.
It looked to me like they were inferring this from, for example, the gracile nature of a femur, I think it was?
And so I don't think they have complete skeletons here.
I think they have fragmentary evidence.
And the reason that they are using three different kinds of evidence here, one of which is actually new to me, and I don't even... The proteomic?
No, no.
The proteomic I get, right?
So the proteomic is going to be basically protein evidence, right?
So, 20 years ago it wouldn't have been called proteomic.
It doesn't make any difference.
Let's put it this way.
They are inferring sex from a certain amount of skeletal evidence and then a bunch of molecular evidence.
Now, why the molecular evidence would be substantially different between males and females, I don't know.
Why the morphological structures would be different is clear, but let's say for example, and I don't think there's a population on Earth for which this would be true, but let's say for example that this population buried only its men.
Right, maybe it does something else with its women, they've not been discovered or the whatever the burial procedure was resulted in the complete destruction of those skeletons.
So you had a population that was all male, and then you come at it with the assumption that half of these are something like half of them are likely to be female.
And you start figuring out which ones are the females, so your assumption causes you to impose femaleness on a population that doesn't have any, right?
Again, I'm not saying that that's likely, but I'm saying we don't know.
We're inferring a number of things.
We are already, if they have it correct that some of these skeletons are female and that they are buried with what they call a full kit for big game hunting, then we are inferring that the implication of that is that these people use those kits in life and therefore in the afterlife would have some need of these kits.
Which makes perfect sense.
I'm not arguing it doesn't make sense.
It's the first level inference would be, yeah, they buried them with a kit of things that they would be likely to need in the afterlife, and the afterlife is similar enough to life that one can infer their in-life behavior from this.
But that's not a dead certain chain of argument.
For sure.
There's uncertainty at each step.
I will say that apparently in this, again, this is not where I spent a lot of time thinking about this paper, but their citation for why they used all three of these methods for sex estimation in combination is based on an also very new paper called a comparison of proteomic, genomic and osteological methods.
Actually that's genomic versus isotopic, I think.
And osteological methods of archaeological sex estimation, which I have not reviewed.
But anyway, they were using multiple methods in order not to get so apparently the osteological stuff can be spurious, but very rarely when combined.
Right.
So all I'm saying, so let me just say, I believe that they probably have this right and that it probably does make the very interesting implication that they derive from it.
My point is just that we are caught in this bind where we're looking at a very tiny sample From one place, that very tiny sample we are imposing a viewpoint on who is of what sex based on three kinds of evidence, none of which are secure in and of themselves, but together they make it much more likely that it's right.
Assuming that whatever we've used to calibrate these methods matches this population, right?
And the population could be distinct in some way.
And then, on top of that, assuming that we've got the sex of the skeletons right, and that therefore we know who's who, we are inferring things about a belief system from physical evidence that cannot possibly report the belief.
Literally, all it can do is imply, why else would you bury a person with a hunting kit?
If they weren't going to need it in the afterlife and why would you need it in the afterlife if you didn't need it in life?
That's so there are a lot of steps here where something could be weird and there could be something Wonderful in what's weird and we might never find it.
We might never know but the point is at some level the most parsimonious interpretation of the fossil or sub fossil evidence that they've found is That women were engaged in this population in big game hunting in high Andean South America Yeah, I think actually that that is right.
Predictions of whether or not you can generalize that to habitats outside of the particular one that they were in or to other moments would be, I think there are real limitations that I would predict only in certain habitats.
And I'm not sure, like one big question for me is what game are they hunting?
This is the Americas, remember.
This is, you know, this is South America.
I don't know what they were hunting and how they were hunting is going to depend not just on their tools, which primarily it turns out were atlatls, but also on what it was they were hunting.
But hold on.
It's going to depend on what tools they were using.
If it's a bunch of men with hand axes, if it's a bunch of people with hand axes, it's not likely to include women for reasons that we'll get to.
And although cooperative hunting is what we're imagining here, it's really unlikely that women are going to have been hunting alone, right?
Like that men going out hunting alone, even in populations where cooperative hunting is the rule, would certainly, I imagine, have happened sometimes, at least for some types of game.
But the prediction would be women are not likely to have done this alone.
We're also engaging in inference here.
Well, I mean, there's a number of places to go.
One place I do want to go here is we've got this National Geographic article about this research, which has, of course, an illustration that I think is quite misleading.
Here's a woman, A, in a skirt, B, hunting alone.
I don't think she's in a skirt.
Well, something, a tunic of some sort.
But she's, but she's hunting alone.
And I guess, you know, it is, it's Camelids that she's hunting, which is the only thing I came up with for what they would have been hunting.
Well, we've got Spectacled Bear is also a possibility.
Yep.
Oh my god.
Okay.
But not there, actually.
It depends on what the actual habitat was like at the time, because Spectacled Bear would not have been above treeline, right?
Spectacled Bear are in sort of cloud and just above level of montane forest in the Andes, but not above treeline, not in the sort of habitat that she is illustrated.
And we have a quote in that article, which is paywalled, so I'm going to just read it to you rather than try to show it to you.
A quote from an archaeologist who was not involved in the research, Kathleen Sterling, who says, Did the newfound toolkit belong to the buried individual?
Sterling challenged the inquiry itself.
We typically don't ask this question when we find these toolkits with men, she says.
It's only when it challenges our ideas about gender that we ask these questions.
Now, that strikes me as an attempt to shut down investigation.
She appears to be questioning a, until very recently, clearly male-dominated way of understanding the world that was present in archaeology, but just because that is true does not mean that we shouldn't always question the inferences that we're making in what we find now.
So I thought to sort of counter that apparently feminist critique of anyone who would question whether or not these were in fact women who were hunting big game, I wanted to read a tiny bit from this amazing book, one of my favorites.
I don't know where the camera is.
Mother Nature, Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species by the extraordinary evolutionary biologist Sarah Blaffer Herdy.
And I guess sort of an academic sibling of ours.
She is an academic sibling of ours.
She was a student of Bob Trivers.
Yeah, exactly.
And we are students of Bob Trivers.
Yeah.
So she wrote in this 2000 book, which I highly recommend.
No doubt patriarchal bias played a role in Victorian and earlier ideas about motherhood.
And yes, such biases permeate the writings of evolutionists from the 19th century onward.
It was an all-male club, and unwittingly.
Darwinians accepted the biased assumptions handed them on a platter by their predecessors, who were more nearly moralists than scientists.
The same biases were still very much in evidence in 1975, for instance, when E.O.
Leo Wilson published his pioneering work on sociobiology, which included a notoriously inaccurate description of foraging societies that claimed that, quote, During the day, the women and children remain in the residential area while the men forage for game or its symbolic equivalent in the form of barter and money.
A Victorian and a 1950s suburban ideal of mother tending the hearth was substituted for the actual life of a highly mobile Pleistocene gatherer.
But Wilson, let's recall, was an entomologist and had to give himself a crash course in ethnography in order to write the chapter on humans for sociobiology.
Perhaps more telling, professional anthropologists themselves failed to register this whopper.
Even anthropologists who had actually helped collect the data indicating that a woman in a hunter-gatherer society might travel a full 1,500 miles in a year while carrying a year-old baby.
The error was simply overlooked because it corresponded with expectations about how the world should appear.
So we had a literature, we had fields that were utterly involved in sort of moralistic, unscientific, naturalistic fallacy type of thinking.
It was even like backwards naturalistic fallacy, right?
They had an image of what they thought should be true and they backfit even when the data suggests entirely opposite things.
That's confirmation bias.
Women were never sedentary and agriculture largely changed that.
That was the moment that did transform sex roles rather dramatically into being more and more divided in terms of the labor that we were doing.
That history is part of what archaeologist Sterling and other people are pushing against, but it comes across as deeply anti-scientific and of course will get in the way of progress and of actually getting to understand what these data truly mean.
So, female hunter-gatherers were never sedentary, obviously.
That's not the job.
But were they big game hunters across lots of habitats on the regular or solo?
Probably not, right?
Because, well, upper body strength is remarkably lower in women than men.
On the other hand, the atlatl is pretty light, and I got to spend some time on WorldAtlatl.com today thinking about atlatls.
Of course you did.
Describes the action of throwing one, which I have never been lucky enough to do, as akin to that for throwing a ball or a stone.
And so, you know, you don't – you can't throw like a girl from, you know, from the elbow.
You have to throw from the shoulder.
But, you know, anyone who actually is engaging in the physical world and throwing things is throwing from the shoulder.
And, you know, depending on its weight, a woman could be expected to throw it quite effectively.
In looking for what the weights of these things were, which I never did quite find, but they seem to be pretty light, I came across a 2013 blog post from a female researcher at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum describing her experience learning to throw atlatls while at an archaeology field school.
So this is just an anecdote, but I found it interesting.
Quote, one of the grad students in the archaeology department had made the atlatl and had also manufactured one of his darts from a graphite rod that he had purchased.
In no time I was throwing that dart 100 meters with ease and some of the other young men in the group were throwing the darts 300 meters.
The darts disappeared out of sight when they threw them.
Well, she doesn't make a comment about this.
She just says it.
This is Evelyn Siegfried, who's at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum, who reports just this anecdote without any explanation, in part because guess what?
It's obvious.
Of course men are going to throw things farther than women are.
And we see this in all throwing sports.
Less so though, interestingly, in things like walking and even endurance running.
The disparity between men and women at, you know, at top performance is a tiny fraction in walking and endurance running.
As it is in things like throwing because our the disparity the average disparity in upper body strength for men and women is Gosh, I can't remember but something like 30 to 70 percent.
I'm not sure about those numbers.
Whereas the average disparity between top Top endurance runners for instance men and women is closer to 10% That's interesting.
And you know, and why?
Well, until we became people who had homes while we were still roaming, everyone had to keep up.
Yeah.
Right?
Everyone had to keep up.
And for a period, not only do women have to keep up, but they kept up while carrying their babies.
And in fact, in many extant hunter-gatherer populations, women actually carry more load on average than men do.
So women had to keep up with men and they tended to do so while carrying more load.
And so You know, they shouldn't surprise us that actually endurance in terms of locomotion is not that different, but that doesn't mean that we're not different in other ways in like upper body strength, which we are.
Absolutely.
All right, so I wanted to go down a little other road here.
So I looked carefully at the date that they believe these sub-fossil finds are from.
They said about 9,000 years ago.
So that is, I believe, going to be well after the megafaunal extinction that happened coincident with the end of the last ice age.
I think that is true, although I have not lined those up for sure.
The reason that it's relevant is that A, what they were hunting might arguably have been a larger list if it was before that extinction had completed.
But also, you know, there is a debate, and I think the debate is actually headed in the wrong direction, or at least it was the last time we checked in with it, about why the megafauna of the New World went extinct about the time people showed up.
And it seems clear to some of us that the best, most parsimonious answer is that the megafauna of the New World, having never been exposed to people before, behaved rather like the fauna in the Galapagos currently does, and what Darwin noted so clearly about it, which is that it just doesn't run away, right?
It doesn't have experience enough to know that a human being is a dangerous creature, and therefore it is very easy for human beings to overhunt.
And that basically... When your dinner is friendly.
Right.
You know, when your creatures just look at you curiously and you can overwhelm them.
And so anyway, one of the questions I had here was if I don't think that there's going to be a general and persistent pattern that yes, in fact, women have been doing a lot more of the big game hunting than we expect.
I think there's some tendency to evolve towards a division of labor on this, but that exceptions are likely to have happened.
This probably isn't the only one.
Sure.
And it may be about something.
Right, like for example, it may be that as the continents of the Americas are not yet full with people, and I think they, there's a strong argument to be made that they never were full, that they were still in the process, those populations were growing at the point that Europeans showed up.
Even if there were 100 million people here before Columbus arrived.
Right, and the estimates are 50 to 100 million people, and the question is what would those numbers ultimately have become, and what implication does it have that carrying capacity for these two continents, if you can use the concept in that way, had not been reached, and therefore selection would be very different, right?
It's not zero-sum selection, it's quite different, which I think would account for many distinctions, and one of them might be that In effect, one does not need to be at peak hunting performance of the kind that would make males the much better resource for the job, because it may be that the hunting pressure on these environments was somewhat less.
Now, you have to be really careful with an analysis like that.
Sure.
Because even if the continents were not at carrying capacity, it doesn't mean that your local habitat wasn't.
And obviously, you hunt local to your habitat, so that's really where the rubber meets the road.
But there's some question I guess as to at the point that human beings arrive in the Americas from from Beringia.
What world did they face?
And what kind of hunting did it therefore reward?
And then what was the evolutionary trajectory?
In other words, the prediction of this hypothesis would be the farther back you go from that 9,000 years ago date, the more female hunting you would see, right?
And the closer you come towards modernity, the less you would see, right?
So I don't know if we'll see that pattern or not, but I think it's a valid prediction.
Yeah, that's great, and it's, you know, if we trust this method of assessing whether or not there were female hunters, which, you know, with asterisk, asterisk, asterisk, we've made all these caveats, but you could test that prediction simply by continuing to keep track of, you know, what the sex of those who are buried with full hunting kits.
Yeah, exactly.
That would be, yeah.
With an ability to age them, and you know, our dating techniques are pretty good.
If well calibrated, they're pretty darn good.
Yeah, I'm more doubtful about the sex assessment on any individual find, right?
If you really have a population, then you can tell on the basis that you really do have different averages.
Yeah, so the problem here in part that you are concerned about with regard to sex assessment is with only, whatever it was, 27 individuals, And, you know, only in, not, none of them together, you don't actually know what the representation for the population is.
You actually, you don't have any idea.
Right, you have no idea, and nothing with which to calibrate it.
Yeah, so that's...
That's that.
Now, I do have one other place.
I hesitate to go here because I think the scientific discussion here is so good on its own.
And frankly, you know, as much as there are places where I will raise skepticism about whether or not they got their sex assessment right and whether or not the toolkits imply what we generally take such toolkits to imply.
I do think, you know, if I had to guess, I bet you they found what they think they found.
And it's pretty interesting.
Right.
But.
That analysis if we put that just slightly to the side and we say now we've got the problem of this analysis is now happening in the present now you and I have argued that there is a Renegotiation of the deal between the sexes that is long overdue and that there are many things which may once have been divided by sex as a matter of division of labor that have no reason to be in the present and And the realities of mating and dating have changed too as a result of birth control and many other factors.
And so it is the moment that we effectively have to renegotiate.
We can't go back because the old stuff doesn't make sense in the modern world and a free-for-all doesn't work either.
So renegotiating the deal is where the smart money is.
However, we are now in a context in which these narratives, you know, a scientific narrative about women having done or not done big game hunting in the past, are going to be contentious by virtue of their implication, or the implication that people will wrongly take for the present.
You know, they will fall afoul of the naturalistic fallacy, and they will want to read things into this.
So you go two ways here.
You've got the likelihood that women were hunting big game, that to the extent that evidence for that might have existed in past samples that it might have been missed by academics who were very likely to be male and very likely even if they weren't male to view things through the eyes of Ancestral academics who, you know, could make foolish errors like E.O.
Wilson's imagining that women were, you know, back in camp, you know, keeping things tidy.
So anyway, there is a very real reason to worry that bias has been playing some role in these, in our ability to understand these stories or find them or look for them or whatever it would be.
And so great that we have evidence that really does strongly suggest if through a series of assumptions that are all somewhat iffy, but does seem to suggest that there was some sort of a different deal in the Americas at least high in the Andes at least 9,000 years ago.
There was some different deal between the sexes.
That's cool.
It's a model for the fact that actually these things can be renegotiated, right?
So I think that's all positive.
On the other hand, We are now stuck with the possibility... How do we know?
Let's say that these skeletons that were buried with these big game hunting tool kits were assigned male at birth, and then were trans hunters.
What?
Okay?
If we take... Really?
That's where we're going?
Here's my point though.
If they were assigned female at birth, Trans and went hunting then the answer is that in fact they were men.
There's no news here Right?
It does point out the lunacy and, frankly, the misogyny of much of the modern trans ideology.
Right.
So the point I'm really trying to make... I mean, A, we're bypassing a tremendously good joke about the authors of this paper having deadnamed these fossils, but...
Or misgendered them or whatever they did.
But the real point here is... I guess you could deadname someone who was already dead.
Yeah!
Double deadname.
That's worse because why, you know, you're kicking them when they're down.
All right.
That's also a terrible joke.
But here's my real point.
My real point is...
On the one hand, we have the awesome, messy, fascinating story of human sex and gender in one population that most of us, you and I spend a fair amount of time thinking about the high Andes, but most people don't, right?
This marvelous story that just, the hint that these fossils have of some different deal between the sexes that existed, right?
Compare that to the mind-numbing story that, you know, that actually there is no sexual binary, and the whole scientific attempt to impose that on people is wrong-headed to begin with, and they were whoever they felt like they were when they were hunting, and there's nothing else to be seen here.
That's a nonsense garbage story.
And anyone who believed that 9,000 years ago left no descendants.
Right, exactly!
If you were that confused as a hunter-gatherer, you weren't a very good hunter-gatherer.
Right.
So anyway, the point, I guess, is, look, can we get over this stuff and can we just embrace the cool, messy, interesting, sometimes awful story that is reality and stop trying to impose morality on it and, you know, purify it and police those who would dare think other thoughts?
Yeah.
Let's.
Let's.
Good.
All right.
You and me will start with that agreement.
I think we should.
Just one more thing that occurred to me that I had not made the connection before with this paper.
If this is 9,000 years ago in the Andes, we actually were at a site, Chobshi, that is thought to have been active about 8,000 years ago.
So, you know, that's both a long time, a thousand years between those, but perhaps the habitats were the same enough and the culture was the same enough.
In which people took cover in this really shallow cave and apparently hunted by funneling guinea pigs and rabbits and porcupines off a cliff and retrieving the corpses or perhaps having to kill the corpses, the not-yet-corpses at the bottom who were injured, and then they turned those things into food and clothing.
And so if we add that as another possible method, which we know, like Shobshi is a well documented and pretty well studied archaeological site, you know, there would be little reason not to have all members of the group who were living At this cave, go down with their atlatls and dispatch any animals that they wanted to eat who were injured at the bottom of the cliff.
I love this!
Whether or not that story is right or stands in for some other story, it makes the point that actually you've got one population here, which gives us one set of archaeological finds that suggest one unusual feature that we didn't expect.
But, who knows what the idiosyncrasies of the hunting environment were at that place?
And as Chobshi shows, you can have all kinds of things.
You can have one particular cliff that, you know, animals don't see coming, and if you can scare them in that direction, they, you know, do most of the work for you.
And so, you know, could this be responsive to an idiosyncrasy of the landscape?
Was it an idiosyncrasy in time?
You know, creatures that were more plentiful and less likely to run away?
Who knows?
Really at some level that's the fascinating thing, is what were the sum total of inputs that caused selection to spit out this output?
If in fact this output is what we think, what caused that?
And it wasn't going to be one thing, it was going to be a combination of factors.
That's right.
All right, good.
We could keep going on, but maybe that's that for now.
So you wanted to talk about our next topic.
You want to introduce this?
Do you want Zach to show the screen or not?
Sure, why don't you show the screen.
So what we have here is Karim Karr, who is a PhD student at Harvard, who made a big splash several months ago on the topic of what on earth 2 plus 2 might possibly equal, and his point was All of you who think it's 4 are failing to grasp just how subjective and arbitrary mathematics is.
And so, in any case, the world descended into madness over this for some time.
Now 2 plus 2 equals 5 is also an oblique reference to Orwell, 1984.
This is, I don't know, is it Newspeak or...
It's one of the modes by which you force a population to totalitarianism.
If you can get people to agree that 2 plus 2 equals 5, well, you're well on your way.
Right.
And just the kerfuffle from many months back was led on the side of no two plus two actually does equal four by our friend Jim Lindsay.
Yes.
So anyway, most people will remember that if they are on Twitter at least.
They will have seen some part of that battle.
And Kareem has decided to blow on the embers of that battle to see if he can rekindle it.
And what has he said?
So we can just get this off the screen.
He's got two tweets here.
He says, when someone says 2 plus 2 equals 4 in a really angry way, they're admitting what the statement can't do for itself.
One can't calmly state it like a fact it supposedly is.
One must back it up with the threat of force to make it stick, and this act affirms the spirit of 2 plus 2 equals 5.
He goes on, and he says, so even when they think they've won the argument, they're losing.
Their defensiveness and anger is already a loss, because it brings 2 plus 2 equals 4 into the subjective, where it belongs.
Those two last points.
Being angry brings the statement into the subjective, and the subjective is where it belongs.
Yeah.
Now, so the reason to be here is not just simply to harp on the absurdity of what Karim Karr is saying and to try to parse it and finally get it right so people can finally understand why 2 plus 2 equals 4.
Because as I said to him the first time through this, what he is engaged in is a classic example of sophistry, which is to say His argument is hard to field, which doesn't say anything about its being right.
And his argument, if you go back to his original claim, had to do with the fact that the symbols 2 and 5 and equals and plus are all something that we simply agree on, and there's no reason to agree that they equal this or that, and so they could equal other things, and therefore the statement 2 plus 2 equals 5 could be a totally reasonable statement as good as 2 plus 2 equals 4, and the answer is That's not just sophistry.
I mean, that's... But colloquially people mean when they say semantics, and it's not actually semantics.
It's not just sophistry, but he's not a PhD student just anywhere.
It's Harvard-level sophistry, right?
So anyway, that is what it is.
That's not really the point to return here.
The reason I wanted to return is that it struck me when I saw his new argument.
That this was actually an interesting opportunity.
So several years back, I think 2017, I gave a talk.
In Vancouver, that I called how the magic trick is done, and how the magic trick was done was basically a sort of a taxonomy of tricks and Kafka traps and other things that are causing the social justice ideology to actually wield a great deal of power in spite of the fact that the arguments that it's making are not correct in many regards.
And what one does not typically see, so one of the things I said in that talk is that these techniques evolve.
People try a lot of stuff and the stuff that doesn't work doesn't leave a fossil, right?
The stuff that works gets picked up on and it gets augmented and it gets built into a very refined strategic structure.
That we realize needs to be talked about at the point that it comes for us and we can't field it because even though we may be right about something, it is very difficult to figure out how you deal with the incentives surrounding it.
So, this Kareem Kar next chapter here.
Struck me as the rare case where you might be present for the birth of a new technique, right?
If you think about his argument here, if people say 2 plus 2 equals 4 and they get angry about it, then their anger is an indication that 2 plus 2 does not inherently equal 4, right?
Well, this is an amazing argument, right?
This is stunning because what this says is, first of all, 2 plus 2 equals 4 is A baseline, nearly foundational level of societal agreement, right?
We have to agree what these symbols mean.
If we're going to establish truth at all, we've got to establish what the meaning of words is, what the meaning of symbols is, what the operations that they dictate are.
And when somebody asserts that 2 plus 2 equals 4 is not inherently true, they are attacking something fundamental.
I mean, you know.
If you imagine, if we were to invalidate 2 plus 2 equals 4, so 2 plus 2 suddenly equals question mark, the modern world ceases to function instantly, right?
There's no device that we're using that doesn't depend on that level of agreement and a great many things stacked on top of it.
It's like many years ago our younger son Toby asked me, what would it be like here if there was no gravity?
And it's exactly that.
There wouldn't be.
There's no here.
Right.
Nothing that we know has happened in that world.
And the same is true for 2 plus 2 equals what now?
Right, exactly.
So, in some sense, what Carr is saying is we have the right to attack the very foundations of systematic thought.
And we have a right to do so in a politically charged environment where those of us who are doing that are actually dictating policy.
Not only are we saying 2 plus 2 equals 5, but defund the police is, you know, a reasonable thing to demand.
So, it is natural that somebody who thinks, oh my god, how did 2 plus 2 equals 5 get out of Orwell and into the world?
And, you know, why is it marching?
Right?
That could make a person very nervous.
They might be right to be nervous.
And they might speak with a certain amount of urgency in saying, no, 2 plus 2 equals 4, goddammit!
Right?
And the point is, that has nothing to do with whether or not 2 plus 2 does or does not equal 4.
That just has to do with the fact that what is in jeopardy if it doesn't equal 4 is really important.
But it's, as you say, a slick rhetorical move that probably just dies here, but maybe not.
It's like a reformulation of Ben Shapiro's famous facts don't care about your feelings.
This new formulation is feelings about facts change the facts.
Yes, feelings about facts are all you need to figure out whether those facts are in fact factual.
I want people to understand just how beautiful and diabolical his formulation is, right?
So let's say that, let's give him the benefit of the doubt here, and let's say, okay, for the purposes of this argument, his assumption is to be taken literally.
If a person responds angrily to the idea that 2 plus 2 equals 5, then they imply that 2 plus 2 does not equal what they think it equals.
Okay?
Now let's apply that across the population.
All of us, but one, decides, you know what?
I'm going to say this very calmly.
2 plus 2 equals 4.
My hand does not shake.
I am not raising my voice.
2 plus 2 simply equals 4, and that needs to remain true, right?
But one person isn't so good at keeping their calm, right?
They're cool, and they get angry because they're worried, right?
Well, that one person has now invalidated 2 plus 2 equals 4 and left us in a world where 2 plus 2 now equals I'm your new king and you will bow before me.
That guy's anger blew up the universe.
Blew up the universe.
And so, in any case, what I'm hoping is that our discussing this here on Dark Horse will result in this particular attempt to generate a new superweapon failing because people will realize just how crazy it is.
But, nonetheless, maybe the point is it's actually sophisticated enough as a strategy that in spite of this analysis it will continue to grow and be augmented and wielded and we will see it morph into all sorts of things out in the world.
We don't know yet.
Well, I mean, in part it may well work.
In part what we're doing here may not touch the effectiveness of the strategy precisely because we are trying to do analysis.
And if the strategy works, it will work exactly on the emotional level, right?
It will affect how people view things, because they will have been informed by the emotional content of people who are certain that actually if you claim 2 plus 2 equals 4, well then you're probably a fascist or some such.
Yeah, absolutely.
So it could be both.
We could do the analysis and it actually might have an influence in a particular quadrant but have no impact on the utility of this argument.
It could still be an evolutionarily stable strategy even if it's dead wrong.
Yes.
Didn't raise your voice.
You said dead wrong in a strong way, but the amplitude was perfectly consistent.
A little sarcastic, maybe.
Yeah.
But that suggests strength.
Oh, does it?
I think actually that works in reverse of his argument.
We're good then.
All right. - Yeah.
Third item of four.
People's generosity across the country with regard to people in Portland seems to be being used to help out criminals.
Pray tell, what might you be talking about?
Pray tell.
Let's see.
Before we show the screen, funds that were created to pay bail for people who were arrested while engaging in vandalism or assault or whatnot during the protests, and especially during the riots in Portland, have been, wait for it, abused by those receiving the bail money.
Who would have thunk?
Color you fucking shocked.
All right.
Yeah.
So here, just let's show the tweet before you start talking about it from Defense Fund PDX.
Some folks think that bail funds can sustain themselves because most bail eventually gets refunded.
In Portland, bail paid is returned to the person arrested, not the person that paid the bail.
We have paid over $100,000 in bail since May.
We've only had a few folks return their bail to us.
If you've had your bail refunded, please consider sending it back to us if we paid it.
You can return it via any of the methods found in the link in our profile.
If you want to mail a check, DM for our mailing address.
Gee, shocked people who are arrested for criminal behavior and get their bail paid for them from the generosity of well-meaning liberals, I would think, mostly.
But there's no expectation tied to it at the point that they actually show up for what would be their arraignment.
Is that when you get your bail back?
At whatever point in the process you show up and you get your bail back, they get their bail back.
It's not theirs, but they take it and they keep it because of course they do.
Yeah, so I should tell you, at one point during the portion of these riots that was attacking the courthouse downtown, I went down there, spiking around, and I saw two people who were part of this bail fund standing next to a sign about donating to it and utilizing it and all of this.
And I was shocked because, A, the whole idea of a bail fund
Certainly intervenes in the incentive structures surrounding these riots in a way that immediately it was obvious like oh What you're doing is you're dropping the cost of rioting if you're arrested during a riot I mean a the state abuses these Penalties so one of the things let's leave rioting out of it for a moment if you are protesting peacefully You can be arrested for all kinds of violations.
Trespassing, protesting without a permit, all sorts of stuff.
Yes.
And it's a nightmare for people that it happens to.
And, you know, basically... We had friends up in Olympia to whom this happened.
Oh yeah.
And there's a whole set of undeclared penalties that come in the form of bureaucracy that surrounds you getting your due process.
Right?
It's an actual, actual nightmare.
And in fact, the cops, when they're going to arrest people at a protest, will often give them a choice, right?
They will say, do you want to be arrested?
And the basic point is, if you don't want to be arrested, then you have to do what we say.
And if you do want to be arrested, then don't do what we say, and we're about to arrest you, and then those penalties will kick in.
And so anyway, it's a sort of unspoken rule under normal protesting.
But in this case, You've got people who are rioting.
You've got other people who are signaling their virtue.
The riots are ostensibly about challenging racial inequity, right?
They're not, but they say they are.
You've got people who want to advertise that they are in favor of racial equity who are signaling this by donating to this fund to bail out these people who are really in, you know, in this portrayal misbehaving, you know, it's civil disobedience, right?
By lowering the penalty here, you are increasing the incentive to continue, right?
Now if these were really peaceful protests and they were really about injustice, that would be one thing, but in the context where they are Actually attacking courthouses and trying to pick a fight with the cops and demonizing people and threatening to kill them and all of those things.
It's preposterous to lower those costs.
But what it turns out is that it's even worse than I thought by a lot.
Because what's really happening is that those who are donating to reduce the cost of being arrested are in effect paying people to engage in those behaviors that get you arrested.
So what you have is people behaving In a destructive and violent way, whose bail is then being paid, they are freed and when they get the money back, it comes to them.
So it is a payment scheme for those who are behaving in these ways.
And what a perfect tell for whether or not these people actually believe in the values that they espouse.
Most of these people will tell you that there's something akin to socialists, or farther left than that, right?
And the honorable, the important, the valuable part of socialism is returning that which belongs to the community to the community.
Right?
If you have a fund that is a pool that is designed to help people like you, and you have been helped in the past, you keep that pool alive by returning it to the pool when you are done.
This is human decency 101, but it's certainly important if you espouse any kind of collectivist thinking, and anyone's failure to pay back that reveals them as exactly the opposite.
Yeah.
Individualistic at a core.
It's bad faith.
Yeah.
It's bad faith.
And at some level this is subsidized anarchism.
And when you ask yourself why it is that Portland has ongoing destruction of property and violence, you know, then this is part of your answer.
So, when you apply these principles locally in this ham-fisted way, what you do is you end up paying people to riot, which is an absurd thing to pay people for, right?
It's the most absurd jobs program conceivable.
God.
Yes.
Okay, so you're feeling pretty far right?
Not as much as some people would have you imagine.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, neither am I. Never have.
We now have a number of conservative friends.
Yeah, I wouldn't say any far right.
Nope, no one far right by usual standards.
Hold on, my computer is taking me a long time to pull this up.
This is in a pre-print server as of what, this week?
Last week?
This week, I believe.
Okay, so for those of you listening, not watching.
Yeah, so that's last week, I guess.
Well, that's when you downloaded it, or is that… That's when it posted?
Yeah.
Okay, so for those listening, not watching, this is… Oh boy, I'm going to butcher her name.
Hossein Mardi, perhaps, et al.
Six authored a pre-print that is to be published in a peer-reviewed journal, presumably, published just two weeks ago, a week and a half ago, called Evaluating the Scale, Growth, and Origins of Right-Wing Echo Chambers on YouTube.
And just, Zach, may I have my screen back for a minute?
Just to jump to one of the main conclusions here, this paper makes the claim that the channel you are watching now, if you are watching this YouTube channel, Brett Weinstein's YouTube channel, along with Sam Harris, Benjamin Boyce, Mike Nena, Gad Saad, Rebel Wisdom, many others, are far right.
And that's on a five point scale.
We got far left, left, center, right, and far right.
Fox News is right.
We're far right.
We're far right.
Fox News is right and we're far right.
Yeah.
And you have, let me see if I can pull this up.
Sorry, this is going to take me a minute.
Here we go.
This is page 26 of the article.
The text of the article is actually very short, but there's many, many pages of appendices and references and such.
Here we have label aggregation.
How did they decide whether or not you were far-right, right-center, left, or far-left?
Well, they relied heavily on a few references.
And here is this this bullet point here, the far-right, any channel labeled as alt-right, IDW or MRA, Men's Rights Activists, by reference 20, or Conspiracy, IDW, Alt-Right, MRA, Alt-Light, Religious Conservative, by reference 23, or Right, or Conspiracy, or Alt-Right.
So let's just talk very briefly about a couple of these references.
20, reference 20, which is a big part of where they are.
Hey Zach and I, thank you.
a big part of where they are basing their assessment is a reference that doesn't even exist online.
You have it's Ribeiro et al.
2020, and when you search here on Google Scholar, it looks like it undid some of my search, but you find Oh, that's super interesting.
Between my search a couple of hours ago and right now, it is now showing up.
So that's, that is new and it's taking a while.
Okay, so this is the basis by which they, this paper is the basis by which the paper we're talking about is deciding whether or not Channels are far right and here this is the first time I've seen it because I literally it was not up a couple of hours ago.
We analyzed 330,925 videos posted on 349 channels, which we broadly classified into four types.
Media, the alt-light, the intellectual dark web, and the alt-right.
And what they say is, or what the Heusen-Marty et al.
paper says, is that that reference that we just were looking at was based largely on the Data and Society paper from, what, a year or two ago, which your brother, Eric Weinstein, roundly criticized with some clarity.
I would say he debunked it.
Yeah, it's total garbage, right.
And frankly, the take home with regard to this part of what we want to talk about is, if you have been identified as a member of the IDW, or are claiming to be in the IDW, intellectual dark web, this term that your brother, that Eric Weinstein invented, Then you are alt-right, end of story.
Not alt-right, sorry, far-right, end of story.
That's it.
And that is the claim made in this paper, that simply if you're IDW, you're far-right, and please stop bothering us now.
That can't even be true, can it?
Because if that was in fact the sole basis of the categorization, then obviously Eric himself would be far right and he's categorized as center.
So there must be more to their categorization scheme than is apparent.
Were you headed somewhere?
Yes, but go on.
Well, I was just going to say, what's more, reference 23 is it?
Or were you about to go there?
The other primary reference that they relied on in this paper So, when challenged in this paper, and I challenged the authors of this paper on Twitter, and one of the authors, David Rothschild, responded extensively.
His point was, look, we borrowed our categorization from these other references, and we did the analysis well, and we were plain about the fact that we had done that.
But in fact, that's not the case.
Mark Gledwich contacted me, pointed me to a thread of his in which he showed that the analysis which this Hassan Mardi paper claims to be utilizing in fact doesn't match their own categorization and I looked at Ledwich's paper and in fact it categorizes us as center.
So there's something very interesting going on here where in effect the Hassan Mardi paper simply asserts that IDW is far-right, right?
It hardcodes that into their analysis and this I think has every danger of being used as a pretext For barring channels from YouTube in particular.
And, you know, this paper was about YouTube.
So where are we headed?
You're talking.
Go on.
So I wanted to point out a number of things.
One, what would it mean for this channel to... So the Ledwich paper categorizes our channel as anti-SJW but center.
And actually this matches, I think, what the content of this channel repeatedly does.
And we can go through some of the things people will have heard us talk about.
Let me interrupt you here a moment.
I did not spend a lot of time with the...
What is it, the Ledwich and Zaitsev paper?
Yeah.
But the paper on which they based much of their, no, the Hosonmani paper is only actually looking at data from 2016 to 2019.
We'll get here, I think, but fascinating to me that I just went back and looked.
At that point, we hadn't begun our live streams at all.
I think there's a couple of videos that I show up in earlier, but your channel had 43 videos up at that point.
Here they are.
It includes such far right questions as, why do plants make medicine?
Sympathy and empathy and evolutionary perspective.
Marriage is an evolutionary phenomenon.
In here somewhere, what do bowerbirds want?
And, and, and so on.
And, you know, the only, you know, we've got a somewhat conservative voice here in Douglas Murray, and a conservative voice in Andy Ngo.
Here you are criticizing Stephen Crowder.
You know, Chloe's no, Chloe Valery is no conservative, John Wood is.
But again, conservative and far right are not the same thing.
And certainly Katie Herzog isn't, and Mike Nena isn't, and Sam Harris isn't.
Yeah, it's a wide diversity.
It's what you would expect from a centrist channel.
But I guess asking what Bowerbirds want is now far right.
I guess so.
So I don't know what order to do this in.
But first of all, there's some question and there was some consternation online about whether or not the analysis was claiming that the channel was far right or the audience was far right.
Now it's very clear from the paper that what it's saying is that the channel is far right.
Um, and not the audience.
And we can talk about what it would mean if the audience was far right, which it also isn't.
But, um, Zach, could you?
I think it just is agnostic about the audience.
Of course.
I don't think, it's not suggesting the audience isn't.
It's in fact, in some ways actually, because it concludes that actually this isn't due to YouTube suggestions.
It is due to Inherent choices of people watching YouTube.
So it is kind of, you know, closer to making the argument that the viewership also is of the political ideology that they're assigning us to, whatever, right?
Than other arguments, other analyses, which are just saying actually it's the YouTube algorithms that are radicalizing people.
So, they took their contribution to be... They took whose contribution?
The Hassan Mardi paper sees its contribution as another mechanism that is not the result of the suggestion algorithm radicalizing people.
Yes.
So, but here's the point.
Okay.
Is the channel far right?
Zach, could you put up the political compass test?
That's my political compass test.
I've taken it several times.
Now I take no pride in the fact that my dot is hanging there off almost the farthest left edge it can be hanging off.
It's there for reasons that I think are quite clear.
What I would say is As I've said many times, I believe we have to engage in radical change or we will perish.
I think radical change is frightening.
We should be very, very cautious about it, but I don't think we have a choice about it.
That said, people have also heard me say that markets are by far the best mechanism we have for figuring out how to do things, right?
So why is my dot so far down in the libertarian end?
It's because I believe that actually meritocracy Is the best mechanism and markets are the best mechanism.
But why am I on the far left edge?
Because I believe we are far from a meritocracy in which everybody has access and that markets have this frightening dual role where they're very good at figuring out how to do things and they're absolutely terrible at figuring out what we should do.
And so anyway, it explains that doc.
Can I just clarify possibly one thing that you said, which is that in the past you have clarified that you would love to live in a world in which you could be a conservative, right?
Yep.
There's an interest in trying to live in a world without markets, because you, like I, understand that markets will always exist, and that we need well-regulated markets.
That an utterly free and unregulated market is a recipe for disaster, but that trying to obliterate markets will also end in disaster.
Yeah, and I also would say- You're not seeking a world without markets.
Right.
Now, I want a world in which markets are free to do what they do very, very well.
And you're right.
I don't want to be a progressive.
I want to live in a world where we're doing so well that progress would be a mistake.
And I know we don't live there.
Yeah.
So you showed your political compass test, but maybe, even though the information in this paper which makes this channel far right basically doesn't include me at all, but it's possible that I'm dragging you down.
Maybe I'm the right way.
Oh, you're the far right one.
I have wondered about that.
Yep, yep, yep.
So here's my political compass test.
Oh, God.
I am farther right than you are.
You're right of me.
Yep.
Well, and still.
Okay, so here's, I think, there are several points that we need to make.
One is, if your goddamn method looked at this channel and decided we're far right, your method sucks, right?
You can just tell that.
This diagnoses your method, and your method is garbage, okay?
So, what I would say is, we are not the only channel that got caught up in this.
Lots of channels that are clearly nothing like far right.
And I would say, although you and I are, I would argue, far left, our channel is center.
Because the point is, we are analyzing perspectives from all over the map and, you know, basically it's heterodoxy.
Well, we are also specifically challenging the errors on the left more than we are actively challenging the errors on the right, because it's our own home.
Like, this is the place where we live, and the right should clean up their messes, should prioritize on cleaning up their messes, and the left should prioritize cleaning up their messes, and we should all be able to come together and convene.
And you know, we do take some shit from people, for instance, for not criticizing Trump enough.
And you know what?
A, it's been done to the degree that we have had any unique perspectives on what's wrong with Trump.
I think we've said it, but it's been rare because he is so fully analyzed.
I was going to say well analyzed, and I don't think it's been particularly well done.
But the fact is that when you see the thing that you are come to have some sort of a pathogen in it, of course you're focused there, as opposed to the more distant enemy.
Yes, I think that's quite right.
I also do want to take a brief step down the road of, well, you know, what about this maybe has to do with audience?
And point out that even if it were true, our audience is not far right.
We know this.
We know that there's a good deal of right of center stuff.
But I would say it is center, to the extent that there is a bias in the audience, it might be center right.
But let's say that there were far right people listening.
Right?
To rate that as a radicalization problem, if you have two people with political compass tests that look like ours, and people from the far right are listening to us, isn't that a success?
Isn't that good that people who maybe, you know, are too extreme to be reached in general are actually hearing somebody from the far other end of the spectrum, and that that might be de-radicalizing them?
And, you know, to the extent that you just want to put together a giant list, and I must say this is the moment of putting together giant lists, Right?
To the extent that you want to compile a giant list of people and you want to say that Gad Saad and Sam Harris and Brett Weinstein and Benjamin Boyce and Chew on Head and all of these people.
Mike Nayna.
Mike Nayna, right.
If you want to just shove us all into a corner where we not only don't have to be listened to, but you can safely If you dismiss us as contributing to the problem, then you're actually contributing to the problem, right?
You're making this a worse phenomenon.
So the fact that the method doesn't work, that it is predicated on at least one paper in which the authors of that paper are alarmed at the abuse of their work.
In which the authors of that paper on which this current paper is predicated reached a different conclusion.
In other words, ranked us as center rather than far right.
That suggests that whatever they're doing, they're not even doing it well or consistently or accurately.
That's right.
And then this raises a question, which is, why?
Why are they doing this?
Right?
Now, I was shocked when I saw this paper.
You have something you want to add?
Just maybe before you go into why, can we show Anna Zaitsev, whose name I'm probably mispronouncing, who was the one of the co-authors on one of the papers that was supposedly used to build these categories and who objected strongly to those categories, posted a long excellent piece on Medium, which for some reason isn't coming up right now, but we'll put it in the
Description of the video, the final paragraph of which is, as a researcher my greatest goal is to find the truth about YouTube algorithms, radicalization, and political bubbles.
I am confident that our prior study and websites recfluence.net and transparency.tube offer currently the most thorough, accurate, nuanced, and technically the most advanced representation of the political spheres on the platform.
So, I just thought we should show these two very, very briefly.
This is RecFluence, R-E-C-Fluence.net.
I've plugged in your name.
The tags, you know, it's not a complete listing of tags at all, of course, but of these tags on the left here, and I'm not going to read them all, I apologize for those of you just listening, not watching, but the tag that your channel, that this channel gets, Brett, is anti-SJW.
Not religious conservative, obviously, but not conspiracy, not partisan right, you know, certainly, you know, not even not anti-theist, none of those.
And, you know, if we if we plug in just, you know, well, let's see, what will your brother come up as?
I don't know why this isn't working.
There we go.
Same, right?
And, you know, his connectivity is slightly different here.
And if you scroll down, you see, you know, like for you, connections to, you know, Sam Harris and Rubin Report and Powerful JRE.
And then the other site that the co-author of the paper mentions is this one, transparency.tube, where you can just plug in any channel and find out what tags, and this is just a slightly different set of tags this channel seems to come up with, and in this one you're anti-woke and center.
And that sounds right for this channel, right?
And so the options here are Mainstream News, Partisan Left, Partisan Right, Anti-Woke, Social Justice, Late Night Talk Show, State Funded, Conspiracy, Religious Conservative, Politician, Libertarian, Anti-Theist, Socialist, Manosphere, QAnon, and White Identitarian.
Which, interestingly, and not surprising at all to me, is a tiny number of sites with a tiny number of views compared to all the rest of them.
And yet, that's the big bugaboo.
That's what everyone is actually scared of.
That gets back to why.
Yes, good.
So this question about whether that's what people are scared of.
And people, of course, have a right to be scared of white identitarianism.
But there's a question about how great a danger it poses, whether that danger is worse in the context of a woke revolution that is basically defining people by skin color in a way that is liable to create that menace, which I have argued on this channel.
But So, there's several points I wanted to make.
One, I consider the fact that lefties have a channel that is center to be something of a triumph, because what we're striving for here is to be objective.
And the reason I think we come out as center is because basically you have political teams evolving, and if you are committed to figuring out what the accurate perspective is on a wide diversity of topics, what you get is something that doesn't match any team's slate of beliefs, right?
You get a la carte analysis.
And given the options, partisan left and partisan right, we explicitly have always, but also on this channel, aim not to be partisan.
Right.
You know, we believe what we believe, and we are seeking to understand reality, but partisanship should not be part of that.
Right.
Which is, I think, the hazard here, is that, you know, you could say the very same thing about Joe Rogan, for example, right?
Joe Rogan himself is a liberal quite clearly, right?
He has people from across the political spectrum and he treats them honorably and I think something has understood him to be a great danger not because he's either On the far right, or because he appeals to the far right, but because if you are trying to control the narrative and wield power on its basis, heterodoxy is dangerous.
And so how do you get people to punish heterodoxy?
You portray it as something dangerous in and of itself.
In other words, if you take the people who are navigating the center, who are heterodox, who aren't putting up with bullshit, and you can portray them as somehow in league with a bunch of white identitarians, then you can explain why you're purging them from platforms.
And this may sound hyperbolic, except, you know, Articles of Unity was suspended from Twitter, remained suspended.
I was kicked off Facebook without explanation and then brought back with an obviously phony story.
Jordan Hall has been kicked off Facebook, as far as I know he has not been restored to it.
So, you know, we've got this thing on the march, which is actually deciding who has access to the world through these platforms and who doesn't.
And there is every reason to fear, whether it is explanatory in the case of this paper or not, there's every reason to fear that those who have something to lose in a proper heterodox analysis of the world conspiring to get rid of voices that they cannot beat on a level playing field.
And that is my concern here is whether or not this set of authors, and we need to get back to who these authors are and why that matters, but whether or not these authors were motivated by whatever it is that caused data in society to release that terrible report.
In other words, if there's some behind the scenes thing that wants to create reports that will justify purging people from platforms, or whether they are simply responding to the fact that there is demand for papers like this.
And therefore, they are basically evolving into a niche where they haven't been part of any such discussion doesn't really matter, because the role that's going to be played by a paper like this is to justify action.
And, you know, what happened in this paper?
You had heterodox voices simply hard-coded, grouped in with unsavory voices in a way that then appears to be the conclusion of the paper, right?
It was built in as an assumption and it appears to be the conclusion.
And the conclusion, if all you do, and you know, it occurred to me that a paper like this functions rather like an end-user license agreement.
The number of people who are actually going to read this paper is tiny.
The number who will understand it is even smaller than that.
And so the real point is, well, what was their conclusion?
Oh, we've got this far right thing and it comes from something other than recommendation algorithms.
What can we do about it?
Yeah.
Well, there's no reason we have to give these people platforms, is there?
Yeah.
Go ahead.
Before you get back to you said you wanted to talk about the authors, but as I was reading it this morning, this paper, which somehow I had remained ignorant of until last night when you mentioned it for the first time, I was thinking about how it is that we do animal behavior.
And I used, as you know, I used to teach students how to do animal behavior Quite a lot, with a strong focus on epistemology, on how it is that we make claims of truth, and on the entire part of the research process.
Not just the statistics, not just the experimental design, not just the hypothesis generation, not just the communication of everything at the end, but the entire thing, from pattern recognition and initial observation of what it is that you think might be true to hypothesis generation, a full slate of hypotheses, etc., that could possibly explain the phenomenon.
And I was imagining a student new to this, you know, an 18-year-old perhaps, who decided that they wanted to study territorial behavior in ducks.
Which was a fairly common thing that students would do because ducks are common enough and territorial enough that you could actually see this happen, whereas in a 10-week project it's hard to see animals do much if you actually go out and try to find it.
But say you now, one of the first things you need to do is figure out what it is that you're calling territorial behavior, right?
And one of the things that people who haven't done animal behavior don't realize is that If you go in with an idea of what territorial behavior is, and then anytime you see something that reminds you of territorial behavior, you call it territorial behavior.
You have simply fed your assumptions into your work, and when your work spits out your assumptions back at you, when you look surprised, you're fooling yourself and the world.
That's not science.
It's terrible, right?
It is absolutely not science, but it's how a lot of this is done, actually.
A lot of published work operates that way.
You plug in your assumptions into your model, whatever it is, even if you're not using some kind of a fancy statistical model, and you get those assumptions fed right back out at you.
And guess what?
You're really not supposed to be surprised at the point that that happens.
So if you went out and started looking at ducks, And you see some males actually up in the water on each other and, you know, bumping breasts and engaging with each other.
You would have to very carefully code what actually you were seeing, but there's a good chance that that actually is some kind of an altercation either over a potential mate or a territory.
You still don't know that for sure, but let's put that in the probably you can take data on that sort of thing with clarity enough and And make an argument that that is territorial behavior.
But maybe you're also, because you know what a territory is and it's about defending a perimeter, you're observing some ducks swimming along what you've identified as a perimeter and occasionally coming up against another male duck and then engaging in one of these breast-to-breast altercations.
Okay, well, sometimes patrolling the perimeter is also territorial behavior.
Good.
And then you say, well, maybe whenever they're anywhere near that line at all, it's territorial behavior.
Well, maybe whenever they swim in the way that they do when they're near that line, it's territorial behavior.
Maybe whenever they're kind of anywhere near an area that I've seen them at other moments engage in territorial behavior, it's territorial behavior.
You see how your expansion of categories can grow, and it will make your data collection easier, because now you have more and more examples of territorial behavior, the problem being it's not really territorial behavior.
What you've collected is a whole bunch of observations of things, a tiny sliver of which may in fact be territorial behavior, but most of which is not.
And then, no matter how good the rest of your work is, no matter how good your experimental design is, or your observational design, which is a totally legitimate way to test hypotheses and behavior, no matter how good your statistics are, your analysis, your description, your literature view, all of this, no matter how good all the rest of it is, It's not science, the research is crap, because the categories that you put your observations into were simply wrong.
And that, I think, is exactly what's going on here.
Yes, and in fact, I have heard and see in this paper that there is some properly done work, quite a bit of it, in this paper.
Properly done on a garbage data set.
Well, no, I don't even think the data set Is garbage, right?
I think the labels on individual things, the labels, the categories, the bins, right?
But if you just, if you strip the labels and relabeled, what we saw by, boy, what was his name?
Mark Ledwich, says actually, I think a lot of this work was well done, but they took my and Zaitsev's data and strangely categorized, I don't know what they did.
Well, you and I are going to get into a thing over this because I, and you know, the same thing would go for Mark Ledwich, which is a, when I'm saying that the data set is garbage, I mean with the labels, right?
I'm not saying that you couldn't analyze these channels independent of those labels and get a reasonable analysis.
But the, but the point is, There is no such category as this is good work, but for the fact that what you fed into it spit out a conclusion that you started with.
So the fact that the quantitative work is well done, I think, speaks to the fact that the nature of this paper is, in fact, pseudo-quantification.
And it has strong confirmation bias.
It suffers from overfitting.
And it is, in fact, ironic that it suffers from overfitting because three of the authors of this paper have written another paper on overfitting.
So they're, in fact, so well-versed in overfitting that they completely understand what it is and yet have fallen into this trap.
And so my feeling is I don't know why it happened, but a paper in which you apply a mathematical method correctly to a data set on which it is not justified is a bad paper.
Okay.
I'm actually not convinced that they've overfit their data.
I'm not convinced that they've engaged in pseudo-quantification.
And I think our disagreement is about this category of garbage data set.
There are multiple ways for a data set to be garbage on which you should not then do analysis.
And in my mind, the sort of platonic ideal of garbage data set, for which that term should probably be reserved, is a data set that is fraudulent at some level, in which the data themselves have been either made up or specifically biased.
In this case, you have a kind of fraud in terms of the categories, the labels, but you could fix the data set by changing the labels and everything else about it.
We are told, and this is not our wheelhouse, I can't assess the mathematical analysis here, right?
I just, I don't have the skills.
But we are told by someone who does, yeah, I think actually the analysis was good, but the categories are so bad that you cannot trust the results.
That's a different kind of garbage data set than one in which the data themselves aren't good.
I don't care that it's a different kind of garbage data set.
It's a garbage data set.
And the fact is, the net effect is overfitting, confirmation bias, and the... I mean, it's like saying, if your lab did Twenty experiments of the same kind and got one statistically significant result, and you published that one, that you would say, oh, well, that paper was good.
No, that paper wasn't good.
If you knew that you had... This isn't like that.
Well, it's a lot like that, because what you have is a...
Competent use of techniques on things that these authors, of all people, should understand are not justified.
You cannot apply these techniques to that data set, encode it in this way, and get anything out that isn't the conclusion that you started with.
But it's just the encoded in this way part that is, as far as I can tell, the problem.
I don't think that anything else is wrong here, and I think you may be objecting because it sounds like I'm saying it's just this one little thing.
This one little thing is foundational, and without this one little thing being correct, it renders the entire interpretation and the rest of the paper null and void, frankly, and it shouldn't have gotten through peer review.
Well, it hasn't.
Because it really is a kind of scientific malpractice.
But there are a lot of other steps at which they could have done bad work and they didn't.
And that is not a justification for the bad categorization.
And bad categorization is not a trivial thing at all.
I don't accept this.
These people, these are not unsophisticated people.
Take a look at that author list.
Here we go.
Okay.
You can show this.
First of all, you have, these are top flight institutions.
You've got Penn, Harvard, Santa Fe Institute, Microsoft Research, and you have this prior paper on overfitting, so they're aware of the hazard.
You have top flight people at highly, at important institutions wielding techniques that they either do understand and wielded badly or don't understand and should have.
And the fact that they did some of the work right constitutes no part of a defense of what they released, especially in light of the fact that what they released actually stigmatized people with channels and put them in a situation with respect to platforms that decide whether or not we have access especially in light of the fact that what they released actually stigmatized people There's no...
If you took...
Let's say that you did a drug safety trial and you knew that the mice were broken in such a way that they would lead you to believe that the compound in question was safe even if it wasn't, right?
And then you say, well, we did the drug safety trial perfectly.
The only mistake we made was we used mice with long telomeres, and the answer is, well, okay, but why did you do that?
Did you know that they had long telomeres, or did you not know?
And if you didn't know, shouldn't you have known?
Right?
Now, there are cases in which somebody might not know in the mouse situation, but in this case, they have everything they need, not only Did they have the knowledge as to what the assumptions of the test that they were going to apply required, but they also had the fact that prior work had categorized these channels differently.
So what's their excuse?
And then I think, frankly, the most conspicuous thing here, it seems like an anomaly, but why did they categorize Erica's Center?
Right?
Now Eric has a hypothesis about this, which I think belongs on the table.
His hypothesis is that because Eric has engaged in challenging conservatives on their channels that he reads differently, which suggests that they did a fine level of encoding here, that they looked at his channel and it looked different because of something he has done.
I think this is very unlikely, for one thing.
I've done some challenging of conservatives on conservative channels too, and so it's possible that those were read differently, that Eric has been more forceful about it, or it was done somewhere that it showed up in their data set.
Well, and it's supposedly the analysis is entirely on the home channel.
It's not about the person who hosts the channel.
So it really, according to what they have stated about how they categorize channels, that should have zero bearing.
But, well... For either of you, for anyone.
And in fact, given what they do show about how they categorize the simple fact that Eric not only is he IDW, but he named IDW, so how it is that IDW justifies being put in the far right column and Eric ends up in the center...
But anyway, my point would be, what I think actually is likely to have caused Eric to be put where he was put, is that he was so forceful in debunking the Data and Society Report.
And so, in some sense, the cost of putting Eric in the far right category was probably regarded as too high, which suggests, if that is the mechanism here, what it suggests is that this isn't even data.
Right.
Right?
That this is cherry-picked in order to reach a conclusion, and for what purpose we can only speculate.
But if the answer is that IDW was misunderstood to be far right, then Eric wouldn't be in the center category.
The fact that he is in the center category suggests that this was massaged for some purpose that we cannot know.
This is true.
And, you know, I see...
Those institutions ought to be concerned that they have people putting work this bad into the world, and the fact that it's people who have the relevant expertise, and therefore this isn't just some sort of mistake, this is the equivalent of academic malpractice, that ought to concern them.
No, I agree with that.
I am not compelled by your argument that there's overfitting or pseudo-quantification and such, but the category errors are profound and fundamental and render the entire analysis not worthy of considering as to whether it might be true or not, because there is effectively – it's built on not even a house of cards, it's built on nothing.
How is that not pseudo-quantification?
Well, I mean, I guess I need a definition then of pseudo-quantification because I'm, you know, in terms of the actual analysis that they did, presumably, and again, you know, not my wheelhouse and I cannot assess, but other people who can assess who objected to what they did categorically, like in terms of categorization, said the way that they performed the analyses aside from the categorization, they did it well.
Well, but they did a mathematical analysis on a data set that is subjective and purely so.
So that is pseudo-quantification.
They have taken something that isn't quantitative in nature, they have made it pure quantitative, and they have spit out a result that suggests that this is the... Yeah, I mean, it's pseudo-quantification.
Yeah, I can see that argument.
There's a long and rich history of turning things that aren't numbers into number-like things, and then doing things to them that you can only do to numbers.
Also in the natural and physical sciences, but especially in the social sciences.
I guess I hadn't thought of that as pseudo-quantification exactly, but perhaps it is exactly that.
I think it is exactly that.
And you know, overfitting, we can argue, because overfitting is traditionally a purely statistical claim.
But the point is, they've got a model, and they basically shoved the data so that it fit it.
And, you know, exactly what you would expect has to be true, which is that things end up in categories that no reasonable person would put them in, in order that the model spits out this answer.
Yeah, it does seem conclusion-driven.
That's editorializing on my part, but it almost reads like glee with regard to the conclusion that the far right, like yours truly, are ascending in the world and oh my goodness, we must clutch our pearls and try to figure out what to do about it.
Well, and in fact, when a bunch of us challenged this, David Rothschild, one of the authors on the paper, responded on Twitter that he was getting a lot of big feelings from, you know, IDW circles, when in fact what he was getting was critique.
Yeah.
So anyway, yeah, there is a lot of... Oh, the last thing I want to say about this is that something else that David Rothschild said on Twitter I think it's Rothschild.
Oh, okay.
In any case, that he was getting a lot of pushback and that they were open to changing the categorization of channels.
Now, on the one hand, I have a feeling our category is going to get changed, right?
What I'm concerned about is that, as happened with Facebook, The only people who are going to be able to get out of this, out of the way of this juggernaut are people who have a sufficiently large channel to embarrass people who write terrible papers like this into taking them out of the line of fire.
And, you know, that cannot be.
Yes.
Right?
You either do the work properly, as I think these other authors have… Ledwich and Zaitsev?
Ledwich and Zaitsev have done, right?
That this is a model for how you do this work carefully.
Or you don't do it at all.
And to the extent that your work is going to be used to shape policy inside of YouTube or wherever, You have an absolute obligation not to stigmatize people, and we can't live in a world where you get to stigmatize the people that you want to stigmatize, and then those people who have a big enough channel can get some sort of an indulgence because they can make us think about it.
Cut it out, right?
You've demonized a lot of people as far-right.
You've raised, you know, this particular white identitarian specter over people who I have no interest in such things.
And in fact, they're exactly on the other side of the spectrum.
And shame on you for doing it.
So cut it out.
And you know, that applies to everybody, big channel or little, doesn't make any difference.
Yeah, no, that's good.
Shame on you.
Stop it.
All right, well, I think we're ready to give our little end piece and take a 15-minute break and then come back to answer your questions in the next hour.
So we'll be answering your Super Chat questions from this hour and from the next hour starting in 15 minutes or so.
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I'm going to regret having said that, aren't I?
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In fact, even as recently as Victorian times, we're exactly the opposite.
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We have them in grey and a different grey.
Right.
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