#68: Drunk Without Power - or - Is That a Fact? (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 68th in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we discuss the state of the world through an evolutionary lens.In this episode, we begin by discussing ice storms and electrical outages, and what it suggests about differing ecologies. We review Daniel Schmactenberger’s categorization of “1st, 2nd, and 3rd person epistemics”, and discuss what they suggest about education. Meanwhile, the NYT argues for skipping the critical reasoning an...
Hey folks, welcome to the 68th Dark Horse podcast live stream.
I am here as always with Dr. Heather Hying.
It has been chaos at every scale.
We are going to attempt to integrate everything.
Topics that we have been considering separately have crashed into each other, and so that's going to leave us a little bit of a task for intermingling things, but why don't you set us in motion in the right direction?
Well, just first a couple of announcements.
So on my Patreon, you could get access to private monthly Q&A, and right now is the 48 hours open session for people to ask questions, which we then sift through and answer on the last Sunday of the month.
So if you were thinking about doing that and wanted to be in a position to ask a question, you can go to my Patreon, Heather Hying, now.
And you also had an announcement similar to one that you gave last week.
Yes, we are going to give away another invite to Clubhouse.
Clubhouse is taking off in the most remarkable fashion.
Yesterday, I stumbled in just to spend a few minutes listening to see what was going on and who did I find there but Joe Rogan.
And when I walked in the room, he immediately called me up on stage and suddenly there I was in real time talking to Joe and Lex Friedman and a number of other folks, Tim Dillon, who we Gently chastised last week.
So anyway, things are afoot there.
And if you would like an invite, the moderator, Gator, is the go-to person, and we will give that out at the end.
All right.
Okay, so where we're going today is we are going to talk a little bit about what Portland, where we are, Portland, Oregon, experienced in this last week from not just a societal perspective, but an ecological one.
And then we are going to discuss, I'm going to pick up on something that you and Daniel Schmachtenberger talked about in that excellent conversation, which again, as I recommended last week, I highly recommend That people listen to, and I finally did listen to it.
And so I want to pick up on something from there about the nature of really excellent education, the nature of good education, and the nature of bad education, which is most of what passes for education now.
And from there, move into talking about the New York Times suggests chiding us, that maybe all of us, not us specifically, but all of us should really abandon some of our critical thinking skills if we want to move forward in the world.
And from there, this is where, you know, I was thinking along these lines and you were thinking along the lines of effectively a kind of fact-checking apocalypse that is coming down the pike at us.
And so we're going to mesh these things, talk about them together, and then we'll finish with just a little bit on dung beetles, including just a new interesting thing that's going on in dung beetle land.
We will finish on literal dung beetles.
The earlier part will cover a fair number of figurative dung beetles rolling dung across the internet and other places.
Metaphorical dung beetles that will end with literal dung beetles, including a video that I took actually in the Amazon.
It turns out it was 13 months ago today, this video that I found on my phone from when we were at Tipitini in the Ecuadorian Amazon, the last time we went almost anywhere.
Fantastic.
Fantastic, yeah.
Oh, and I guess one other thing.
As we were about to tell you, we were basically incommunicado all week and had to cancel a number of conversations we were supposed to be having, but Megan Murphy did post the conversation that she and I had back in January, and that's on YouTube now.
I made a couple errors in it, which I'm not going to specify here.
They are significant to me, but won't be to most people listening who don't care deeply about some of the Arcane biological things, but I think it's a really good conversation.
It actually gets at some of this question that we keep on coming back to of like, what does it mean to follow the science?
What is science and what therefore should you be doing as you try to navigate the world scientifically?
I recommend that conversation on Megan Murphy's YouTube channel.
And that meta-conversation is so important.
You and I got dragged in the direction of the philosophy of science, which I don't think either of us regarded as super important until graduate school.
Dragged in graduate school.
Dragged in graduate school largely by Arnold Kluge, your primary mentor.
And anyway, I have never regretted a moment we spent learning about it or thinking about it.
It's amazing how many scientific issues actually come down to some slight nuance of the philosophy of science, which although PhDs are supposed to be philosophers of science, right?
It's a doctor of philosophy.
Most just never bother to think about it, and having never bothered to think about it, they screw up little things and it's every bit as devastating as the failure to meet even basic assumptions and statistics.
This is absolutely right.
In fact, I once said to a philosopher, a PhD in philosophy, which would seem to be somewhat redundant, that when she was dismissing some scientific ways of thinking as being a-philosophical, if not downright anti-philosophical, and I said, but of course, all modern scientists have degrees in philosophy.
It's what we are supposed to be doing.
She literally laughed at me.
And I was able to demonstrate that many of us do, but in fact it's by far not all of them.
And I think it is part of why you see people with the credentials not actually being able to demonstrate that they even know what science is, and certainly not being able to demonstrate how you would do it or under what conditions you should in fact trust a result that you find and under what conditions you shouldn't.
All right, excellent.
So let's get to it.
Let's get to it.
This is the segment that we were thinking of calling Drunk Without Power.
Drunk Without Power.
You'll see why shortly.
Yeah.
So are we going to start with the pictures?
Actually, yeah, just a tiny bit of description first.
So a week ago today, there was snow outside.
There was snow on the ground.
And we were saying, yeah, it's pretty rare for Portland, Oregon to have snow on the ground.
And we had a series, it was either two or three distinct weather events, snow and ice storms, that came through Portland and southwest Washington and a lot of northwest Oregon.
And it certainly wasn't the largest weather event that this area has seen, even in living history.
Even, but it did cause the greatest power outage in Oregon history, actually, in terms of the number of power customers affected.
So at one point, more than a third of Portlanders were out of power, and people from a lot of the surrounding areas lost power.
A lot of people are still out of power.
Our power went out mid-morning on Valentine's Day, and we just got it back on Thursday, so we were out for four full days.
For some of that time, our cell service was also out.
I literally, in order to make sure that we didn't miss something, you know, in order to cancel something that needed to be canceled, I actually had to climb a hill to where I could get, you know, cell service from an adjoining tower because, you know, just everything in our neighborhood was Basically, the power took out the cell service because the towers weren't getting power either, and I'm sure they have some backup, but it didn't last, and suddenly we were cut off.
It didn't last.
Yeah, the cell towers didn't actually fall, but many, many power lines were down actually in the street, visible to us, multiple different streets within blocks of our home, lots of downed trees and branches.
And for me, some of what was super interesting, and yet we know this from ecology, is how patchy it was.
Right, like there are areas near us that never lost power at all.
And certainly if you don't live among the trees, you were less likely to lose power unless you were getting power from an area that did have them because a large part of what happened was trees falling on lines, although that's not the only thing that happened.
Yeah, so let's, you know, for those of you who have not had the joy of experiencing an ice storm, let's just talk for a moment about what it is and why it happens.
I'm thinking about people in Los Angeles who may have only sort of vaguely thought about this.
Where we grew up, and until we moved to Michigan, we're somewhat – well, I guess we both spent time in the Sierras, so we were familiar with ice storms already.
Yeah, although ice storms are a special weather condition.
It's really a combination of weather conditions where things down here on Earth cool down below freezing, but they're warm enough at the point that the precipitation falls that it doesn't fall as snow.
It falls as liquid water very close to the freezing point.
And then upon hitting very cold surfaces, it freezes and accumulates.
And the thing about it is it's really heavy.
Um, my recollection is that when we lived in Michigan, ice storms happened, they caused damage, but in general because power lines got too heavy, the trees were actually much better adapted to it.
But because it's fairly rare out here in the Pacific Northwest, our trees, they don't budget for it because that would be very expensive and reduce their competitive viability.
So this is actually exactly, I think, one of the central points here that it's easy for people in places with reliably bad winter weather to mock the regions of the country like Texas right now, like Portland this last week, like Los Angeles whenever it rains even, right?
For being unprepared and incapable of dealing.
And it is true that socially, societally, if you don't have experience driving in the rain, even rain is tough for you.
If you don't have experience driving in the snow and ice, even that is difficult for you.
And that is just a truth.
And so you reported that apparently Portland has three snow plows.
That is what I learned from the Portland subreddit.
Which is, you know, it seems super low, except most years none of them get used.
Right.
So this social truth by which humans tend to mock other humans is mirrored by a deeper and much older ecological truth, which is that the trees here, the trees, not the people, but the trees here, don't tend to deal with ice buildup on their branches.
Whereas in Michigan, where some kind of ice storm happened every year, and we're just using Michigan because that happens to be where we lived for eight years or something in grad school, The trees didn't explode, right?
They dealt with it.
You still had power outages because power lines don't deal well with ice buildup, but the trees were better adapted to a situation because it was more common.
Any place that you get extreme weather events that are not common, the organisms there are less likely to be able to deal with it.
In Portland, a particularly ridiculous situation because I think of the repeated freeze-thaw cycles with so much buildup.
But then in Texas, it's even more out of the ordinary what happened.
They're dealing with their own kind of hell as a result, not of them being incompetent, but rather of the entire system, including the system-absent humans, not having this as a regular feature of their life.
Yeah, in Texas this can happen if three people leave their freezers open on the same afternoon, right?
It's a very rare thing for it to get cold enough to create... Have you, in fact, ever been in Texas?
I have been to Texas.
Yeah, I know, I've been there with you, but obviously that's not true.
Right, no, that's... oh, true!
Geez, no, most jokes are not true.
I don't even strive for it anymore.
No, I mean, obviously that was a joke, but like, you know, Texas gets cold the way the high desert in California, you know, gets cold, right?
And not all of it.
You know, Texas is gigantic and Gulf Coast is different from, you know, up near the borders with the mountain states.
But this level of storm was unusual.
Yeah.
But now my joke is just making me look dumb.
Oh, I know what you're thinking.
I'm not sorry.
You're thinking many of them do.
No, I was just thinking, should I apologize?
No, I'm not sorry.
Don't apologize.
All right, so let's look at some pictures.
Zach, do you want to put up a series just to give people a sense?
All right, here we have some ferns, and you can see there's a thick coating of ice on them.
These are sword ferns.
Skip ahead one.
Okay, here you see you can really get a sense for how much ice is on the plants.
This is a rhododendron.
And, you know, there's a thick, it's like an inch thick coating of ice on each of these leaves and, you know, that's one thing if it's one branch which is robust to wind and this branch is standing up to it reasonably well, but you can imagine scaling that up over an entire tree.
How much extra weight the tree is dealing with in this circumstance.
And I must say, we didn't get terrible wind this time.
Sometimes the combination of wind and ice storm happens, you know, it's every, I don't know, five years, maybe eight years.
Pacific Northwest, we get such a thing, but that's really devastating too.
All right, skip ahead one.
All right, here you can see again, every branch, there's like multiple times the weight of the branch in ice sitting on the surface of the branch.
Every surface was cold and they all accumulated in.
Okay, here you can see a close-up, and I don't know if your screen's good, you can see the crystalline formations on the surface of this ice.
This is just a branch.
It must be, you know, eight times as heavy as it normally would be.
All right.
Again, one more.
Here, I spent a lot of time trying to capture a droplet falling off of one of these bits of ice.
Alright, and then here's what happens, is the trees build up the ice, some branch that was within tolerances is suddenly way above tolerances, collapses, and here one has landed on a power line and short-circuited it, and the power everywhere downstream of this is off, including the signals.
And this was all over the place.
There were, you know, there were multiple entire trees down in many locations, often across the road.
And the problem is that the system has become so fragile that, in fact, the power company initially was reporting very long periods of time in which they expected to repair it.
And then they pulled all of their estimates.
They stopped estimating altogether.
Right.
What they realized was that every time they got something, they found a problem and they hooked it back up.
Something downstream was short-circuited, and they would pop that breaker.
There was a branch they didn't realize on another power line that immediately shorted out a number of houses.
In fact, our power came back on for five minutes.
The afternoon it went out, and then we were plunged into darkness for another three and a half days.
Yes, in fact, it came back early, and I believe my exact words were something like, I'll believe it if it lasts more than five minutes.
That's about as long as it lasted.
Yeah, it went out again.
Okay, and then there's one more, which is the result of all of this, is here we were in the dark, drunk without power.
But with curry powder, apparently.
Well, sure.
I mean, you wouldn't want to have a beverage without curry powder.
And this is the hot curry powder, by the way.
Yes, of course it is.
Yeah, I did have the prescience to make a giant pot of soup that first night, which because we have a gas stove, we were able to heat up every night.
Yep.
All right.
Cool, okay.
So let us move on to our next biggest main topic, and we'll start by – I'm just going to actually read – someone, thank you, actually wrote a transcript of your and Daniel's conversation.
And really, again, I recommend that conversation very, very highly.
But I was taken by several pieces of it, but this one, this piece in particular, which happens at the hour and 51 minute mark in your conversation with Daniel Schmachtenberger.
This is Daniel talking.
The only answer out of the oppression or chaos is the comprehensive education of everyone in the capacity to understand at least three things.
They have to increase their first-person, second-person, and third-person epistemics.
Their third-person epistemics is the easiest.
Philosophy of science, formal logic, their ability to actually make sense of base reality through appropriate methodology, and find appropriate confidence margins.
The second person is my ability to make sense of your perspective.
Can I steal men where you're coming from?
Can I inhabit your position well?
And if I'm not oriented to do that, then I'm not going to find the synthesis of a dialectic.
I'm going to be arguing for one side of partiality, harming something that will actually harm the thing I care about in the long run.
And then first person.
Can I notice my own biases and my own susceptibilities and my own group identity issues and whatever well enough that those aren't the things that run me?
I'll read just a little bit more.
When I, Daniel, look at the ancient Greek enlightenment, first person was the Stoic tradition, second person was the Socratic tradition, third person was the Aristotelian tradition.
There's a mirror of all those in modernity.
We need a new cultural enlightenment now where everyone values good sense-making about themselves, about others, about base reality, and good quality dialogue with other people that are also sense-making to emerge to a collective consciousness and collective intelligence that is more than our individual intelligence.
So, as almost everything that you guys talked about, both of you were like, I want to go 18 places from that, right?
but it also isn't oppression because it's emergent more than imposed.
So it's cultural enlightenment or bust as far as I'm concerned." So, you know, as almost everything that you guys talked about, both of you were like, "I want to go 18 places from that," right?
And so one of the places to go from that is, you know, my sense was this is, as he says, this is exactly what education should be doing.
Most good education, most good but traditional education, doesn't actually even attempt the first or the second person epistemics.
It attempts the third, and sometimes it gets there.
Second, he doesn't use this language exactly, but I think second person epistemics is basically theory of mind.
And, you know, it's not unique to humans.
There are other organisms that engage in theory of mind, but the ability to place yourself in someone else's perspective and really understand that they see things differently than you do is critical to this collective consciousness, which of course we have talked about a lot.
And then first, first person epistemics is what we have called in our book actually, the laboratory of the self.
And as educators, you know, listening to Daniel, I thought, wow, you know, your Brett conversation with Daniel, our friend, and, you know, in the very end of that conversation, he sort of salutes us as educators and was very kind.
But I do think that you and I, specifically, without ever having categorized it this way, like I really love his categorization, We're trying, and frankly usually succeeding, in doing all three things.
In both modeling first, second, and third person epistemics for our students, and also expecting them to derive the abilities to and engage with each other, having found their own first person, second person, and third person epistemics.
It's going to be a little bit different how you engage in the world.
As you point out in another point in the conversation, as we have talked about for decades, there's a piece of science that maybe can't be taught.
I disagree with you a little bit on this, but the formulation of hypothesis is the black box that is is the thing that is not taught when you're teaching the scientific method.
That sort of just always appears, like, okay, now you've got hypothesis and now everything downstream is a scientific method.
But I guess I would say, look by comparison at what, for instance, you know, diversity, equity and inclusion, so-called education is doing.
It's this pathetic, shallow nightmare of prejudice and insipid thinking, It's anti-educational.
It imagines, it abandons third-person epistemics, claiming that that's, I don't even know, white supremacist or misogynist, who knows what.
It never even pretends to engage in second-person epistemics, like there is no you, there is no outsider in this worldview of the woke revolution, the post-modern takeover of the academy and media and everything.
And it presumes, and I actually made this point when we were talking about white fragility back in June or July, it presumes that the personal lived experience of the person talking is what is true for everyone.
It is like the supreme form of narcissism that is anti-educational, and I think it exactly, to use Daniel's characterization, categorization, It takes a single experience and imagines that, you know, the first person epistemics and sprays it, you know, scattershot across the entire landscape as if it applies to everything.
Actually, I want to go back to a couple things.
One, there's an argument to be made that it...
The thing about what we call laboratory of the self is that you will never have better information on, or you will never even have really high quality information on what it's like to be the next person.
Like you're the next person to me.
You and I spend a ton of time together and we've spent many, many years together.
So I probably know you as well as anybody can.
You know, it's still a step removed, right?
But I have very good information on what it's like to be inside my conscious mind.
There's lots of stuff I can't access.
But in any case, to take the... So, the data is very good for self.
But it's not a substitute for a dispassionate analysis of the world.
The point is it's actually an interesting source of information that you then want to test against patterns that you can see externalized.
And neither of those is a substitute for the second person.
Right.
Of actually engaging with another person's mind and hearing when they say things that surprise you.
And not immediately saying, you're a bigot, or you're wrong, or try again, but, oh, you actually have a fundamentally different understanding of or experience of the world.
Let's explore that.
Right.
So in some sense, I think what you and I are going to land on, and you know, the weird thing here, you and I entered the public consciousness as Evergreen became an absurdity.
And so you and I are constantly battling the fact that actually Evergreen, the founders of Evergreen, had something very, very right, right?
And it went off the rails because they didn't get everything right and nobody fixed the problems.
But the basic point is, there was something absolutely magical about not being stuck in any one of these realms.
And we've seen failures stuck in all of these realms.
We've seen an obsession with dialogue that, you know, that demotes the… Seminar!
Right, there you go.
We've seen, you know, an obsession with personal experience.
And, you know, in other places, you know, as graduate students, we occasionally, we I remember John Vandermeer brought us into a class of Central American graduate students.
In Costa Rica.
Yeah.
And the culture was very, very different.
In fact, it was so deferential.
Very quiet.
Right.
And the problem was, well, you can't do science, you know, you can't innovate in science if you're deferential to ideas that are It's certainly partially wrong.
You have to be in a mode to challenge.
And so, anyway, any one of these layers... But there's a cultural expectation of not challenging the authority figure, which is, as you say, antithetical to actually becoming a scientist.
Right.
So, in some sense, the discovery is that you need all three of these things in play in the dynamic in order to make real useful progress.
And any time you've defaulted to one, you lose.
Even defaulting to two, you lose.
You need all three.
So, one thing is, the day before Joe Rogan showed up on Clubhouse, there was a discussion on Clubhouse about... The day that shall forever after be known as the day before Joe Rogan showed up on Clubhouse.
Well, here's the thing.
For anybody who is not paying attention to Clubhouse, I know this all seems weird, but you know, Joe Rogan...
Hops in there, and suddenly a room goes to 7,000 people with three overflow rooms.
I thought it was maxed at 5,000.
Well, it was, but it then got to 7,000, and then while Joe was in the room, the engineers changed it, and it became 8,000.
Okay.
Right?
But anyway, the point is, Joe showing up there just to check it out is unfortunately a terrible Heisenberg problem, where it's like Joe can't check out Clubhouse because Clubhouse obsesses over him, and then it gets spread on Twitter, etc.
But anyway, the thing is, if you go back to The Joe Rogan experience, right?
The Joe Rogan experience does contain all three of these layers.
Yes, it does.
This room that was on Clubhouse the day before Joe showed up was, is Joe Rogan a danger to science or words to that effect?
And this brought a bunch of us into the room.
Joe wasn't there, of course, but Lex Friedman and me and Eric were in the room trying to explain why Joe Rogan is actually a huge asset to science and that it is really a misunderstanding of how science works.
That causes people to even formulate the question, right?
And so that, you know, you can see how it all would play out.
But final thing I want to say on your intro there is I know what you're disagreeing with me about with respect to the formulation of hypotheses and whether or not it can be taught.
There's like two components, right?
There's the, once you have an idea of what might be going on in a system, how do you make it into a hypothesis?
That you can teach, right?
The problem, the thing you can't teach, is how you traffic in wrong ideas, right?
Such that you can spot one that is in the category of wrong ideas, but might actually be right.
But so, I mean, we should talk a lot, a lot, a lot about education for the rest of our lives, really, because we did.
Never planning to become so.
Become really, I'm just going to say it, like extraordinary educators without ever having any of the training, and I think that helped.
Yeah, maybe because of not having training.
Right, right.
And because we both had such totally different educational experiences through all of our schooling, And we're intimately familiar with each other and therefore each other's experiences.
We walked in being able to model, okay, you are a student who doesn't look anything like I've ever experienced before.
I still bet you have something to offer.
Let's figure out how to draw that out, how to help you realize that you actually have something to offer as opposed to treating me as an antagonist that you're just trying to get through the class through.
So, one of the things that I did most of the first weeks of most of my programs was this exercise actually that John Vandermeer again.
So, John Vandermeer was one of our graduate school professors who's a neotropical biologist.
And we spent a summer, he basically created this field course in tropical ecology and conservation in Costa Rica for us.
Four other grad students, something, and then he had an elder grad student who was effectively TA, so it was like eight of us.
I mean, I could name everyone if I thought about it, but a very small group that he spent, you know, six, seven weeks touring around all these different places in Costa Rica, which of course became some of the basis for me creating my own study abroad programs later, although I never did it in Costa Rica.
He ran us through an exercise that was from the Organization for Tropical Studies, which was the standard bearer of how you become a tropical ecologist.
You go and take one of these four-week classes, and they just didn't happen to have any the year that we were interested in doing this, so he created this for us.
And what the exercise is, as you know, is the professor takes each of the students out to someplace in nature with just a pen and paper, really hopefully nothing else, and parks them out of view, certainly, hopefully out of sight of any other human being, and says, I'll be back for you in two hours.
Don't move unless, you know, your life depends on it.
And just sit and be and watch and listen and use all of your senses, depending on where you are, taste is sometimes off the table appropriately.
And then at some point that your brain has quieted down enough to stop telling you how very bored it is and how very much you want to get on the phone or get some Skittles or whatever it is that you are just too antsy to sit and just be.
Start noticing what is going on around you and start writing down questions.
And it's just questions.
And then after two hours, comes back, go back, and then the next part of the exercise I think he did with us right away.
But this is something that I did with almost all of my students.
And you know, I had 25 or 50 depending.
And, you know, I did this in Panama.
I think we did it in Ecuador.
I did it in the scablands of eastern Washington.
I did it in the San Juans.
I did it in a number of places.
And so far, all we've heard is, you know, students come back hopefully with some questions, hopefully as many as 20, but whatever, that they have had about things that they are observing that are happening outside of their own brain.
So, you know, questions about why am I so bored or, you know, like less interested in those for this perspective.
And then group up the students in small groups and say, look at each other's questions and figure out which ones you're most interested in trying to figure out and pose hypotheses and figure out what the predictions would be that follow from those hypotheses.
And then we're going to get back together and you'll make these posters and we're going to put them all around the room and we're going to go through each group and talk about at least one or two of these hypotheses and the predictions that follow them from each of the initial observations.
It is so amazingly revealing about just so many aspects of science.
For someone, I would often do this either the afternoon of the same day or the next day, but for people who had literally never considered some observation or some hypothesis before, how fiercely wedded they became to that thing.
How just adamant they were that this has to be the truth.
Wow, you didn't even think of this 24 hours ago.
And just recognize how fiercely wedded you are to this now.
Okay, also take a look at these predictions that you have that follow from this hypothesis.
No, they don't.
Or they also would follow from your alternative hypothesis.
Therefore, they're not predictions of one or the other.
They're predictions of both.
Therefore, they can't help you discriminate between the hypotheses.
How many giant questions that you simply can't answer at that level scientifically had to be teased apart into smaller bits that is not apparent until you've actually done this exercise?
This was the little bit by which I, almost every quarter that I taught, was trying to teach people how to begin to formulate observation, pattern recognition, hypothesis generation, prediction generation.
Yep, I definitely see it as a hugely valuable exercise.
The degree to which students who don't grok what a hypothesis is are always left groping for how you go about formulating it.
Now, sometimes they happen onto a method, but it's very often Not some method we've conveyed.
The point is, well, think about it, right?
What might explain the thing you're seeing?
And the answer is, well, your brain's a black box and either it can figure out how to do that trick or it can't.
And if I, you know, what I did, I showed them I just modeled it, right?
Yeah.
And the point is, I don't know that I ever taught a student to do it, but the point is by modeling what you're trying to get to, then some of them find their own method for doing it.
But again, it isn't.
I mean, modeling is a kind of teaching.
I mean, I guess that's that's the distinction I'm making, that when you say you can't teach this, I think, boy, education looks a lot of ways that I wouldn't have thought it did 20 years ago.
This is exactly the point I'm making.
I'm not saying you can't mentor it.
Right.
But you can't teach it.
Right.
There's not an exercise.
I'm not sure I buy the distinction.
Well, all right.
I mean, I'm quite convinced of it based on my interactions with my mentors, who I think did it very differently than I do.
And the best mentors knew it.
And so the point was they cultivated, they were good sounding boards, but they didn't, you know, they never set about trying to, you know, give me a method or show me how to accomplish that thing.
But anyway, let's table that for the moment and move on.
All right, so if good education, but not great education, does successfully engage in third-person epistemics, in which it tries to provide a way through philosophy of science and logic and analysis to understand the world and engage in sensemaking of the world, if not of yourself or of the other people in it, compare that, that good education, to
This, which our producer and 16-year-old son Zachary pointed me to yesterday in the New York Times op-ed pages, so my screen is not... Why is it so slow?
Yeah, I don't know what's going on there.
Hopefully it comes up because I can't read it otherwise.
Oh, here we go.
Okay, so the opinion from February 18th, op-ed page.
Don't go down the rabbit hole.
Critical thinking, as we're taught to do it, isn't helping in the fight against misinformation.
Oh boy.
So as it turns out, you know, this starts as this kind of banal, not surprising, not, it shouldn't be controversial, suggestion that actually every time you run into something on the internet that you think might not be true, you don't actually need to spend 15 minutes chasing it down.
Like you are not obliged to spend 15 minutes chasing down every single thing that you run into on the internet.
Boy, if you needed to hear that advice from the New York Times, you've probably got a deeper problem.
But it gets, this op-ed gets crazy here.
First, we have four simple principles, which, you know, at first glance they seem reasonable when applied appropriately.
Refining the practice, and this is, he says, we suggested modeling the process after the way professional fact-checkers assess information.
He refined the practice into four simple principles.
Stop, investigate the source, find better coverage, trace claims, quotes, and media to the original context, otherwise known as SIFT for the initial letters of the four points.
Stop, investigate, find, and trace.
Mr. Cole feels so, and I'm going to just read a couple of paragraphs here from from three paragraphs from this op-ed.
Mr. Caulfield walked me through the process using an Instagram post from Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a prominent anti-vaccine activist, falsely alleging a link between the human papillomavirus vaccine and cancer.
Quote, if this is not a claim or if I have a depth of understanding then I want to stop for a second and before going further just investigate the source, Mr. Caulfield said.
He copied Mr. Kennedy's name in the Instagram post and popped it into Google.
Look how fast this is, he told me as he counted the seconds out loud.
In 15 seconds, he navigated to Wikipedia and scrolled through the introductory section of the page, highlighting with his cursor the last sentence, which reads that Mr. Kennedy is an anti-vaccine activist and a conspiracy theorist.
Is Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
the best unbiased source on information about a vaccine?
I'd argue no, and that's good enough to know we should probably just move on, he said.
He probed deeper into the method to find better coverage by copying the main claim in Mr. Kennedy's post and pasting that into Google search.
The first two results came from Agence France-Presse's Fact Check website and the National Institutes of Health.
His quick searches showed a pattern, and here it is.
Mr. Kennedy's claims were outside the consensus, a sign they were motivated by something other than science.
I'm just going to read that again.
Yeah.
You know, Mr. Kennedy's claims were outside the consensus, a sign they were motivated by something other than science.
I think someone doesn't know what science is.
Yes, you could say, I rest my case.
At the point someone has said something like that out loud, you know just how far they are from an understanding of how science works, what facts might be.
So, don't dig deep, people, ever.
Just trust the authorities, and whenever anything doesn't match the consensus, you know that they're not using science.
Well, I would even point out there's something even weirder in this, which is that the fact that they check is not the question about HPV.
The fact they check is whether or not Robert Kennedy Jr.
It's a reputational smear, right?
Is a reliable source, as if that's a factual assessment, right?
And the very article introduces him by calling him a conspiracy theorist and anti-vaccine guy.
Right.
It's a totally separate question as to what his positions actually are in vaccines and how nuanced they are or are not.
The fact that we are being informed of the conclusion as we are then told how to come to that conclusion and the way that we are told to come to that conclusion is deeply, deeply flawed and suggests a misunderstanding of how it is that our understanding of reality advances You know, if you're outside of the consensus, you must not be understanding or dealing with science.
No, actually, it's the opposite.
Yes.
In fact, what you are really being told is that we will do the job of deciding what is true, and we will deliver it to you in a packaged form, and you just simply have to check whether it's on the science approved list or not.
I mean, this is wrong in so many different ways.
First of all, You'll get this kind of claim from people who, in theory, have gone through graduate school and gotten an advanced degree in science, right?
Those people should know better, right?
They've seen the politics on the inside.
They understand not only that wrong ideas can get a foothold.
They understand that things like the replication crisis emerge and that those results that were unreplicable were wrong to begin with, right?
For all of the years that people claimed that they were based on reliable science, there was a hidden flaw that had to do with the way the statistics were deployed that told us what was right and what was wrong.
And as Daniel says repeatedly in your conversation with him, and as we have said before as well, even if the methods were right, when those methods are applied to the wrong question, you won't get the right answers.
The methods have to be right.
They have to be applied carefully.
The people who apply them have to be willing to sacrifice their own career well-being in the interest of finding the truth, which is not a common characteristic for people.
And it's not a characteristic that science programs now select for.
They select for people who are ruthlessly interested in advancing their own careers, which is antithetical to the The instinct that that is necessary so the number of ways that the established consensus conclusion can be wrong is indefinitely large and we are living in an era where those conclusions are increasingly rotten and to at this same moment be dealing with a question of whether or not there is a
Responsible way to check whether something is true it involves seeing whether the person who said it is In some way defective and at the point you discover they're defective.
They're obviously wrong, right?
That's not a method.
I recognize that's That's a that's a mind virus right there All right, so This leads us to many other places.
Are we where you wanted to go with that?
Lead away.
OK.
So I want to point us to what I think in the last week or so has become clear as the next attack vector against reason, against enlightenment values, against liberalism, against all sorts of things that longtime listeners to this podcast will be well familiar with.
And it's hard to know where to start with this, but I want to point out something about the very special nature of zero.
Now, zero is a special number.
It has always been a special number.
It has unique properties, mathematically speaking.
It is strange enough that although it's hard for us moderns to grok what this means, and I still don't know that I do grok what this means, the Greeks didn't even have the concept of zero.
Zero.
The Maya did, right?
It's one of the ways in which they actually outdid the Greeks.
They are in many ways parallel to the Greeks for the New World, much less known to us because almost none of what they accomplished survived in textual form.
But nonetheless, having a concept of zero gives a civilization a huge edge.
Zero is mathematically special, but it is also special with respect to the battle to control narratives for political purposes.
And I'm going to claim, actually, borrowing somewhat from Arnold Kluge's file cabinet, which sat at the entrance to his office and had a note on it that said, it's about power and limited resources, stupid.
And this never needed any explanation because those who stopped to notice it all understood what he was getting at, which was that this is the reason that humans get involved in conflict.
And I'm going to claim that this is true with respect to the conflict over not only what the correct narrative is, but what the allowable tools are For it to progress, right?
We are being sold an absolutely authoritarian version in which the only kind of truth is the Aristotelian or the personal, right?
The middle layer is not allowed to even exist.
And so my point about zero is this.
In a world in which the scientific consensus is going to be synchronized to something wrong, It is necessary that there be no universities in which another perspective can survive.
The difference between a universe in which one university is able to do something else and a universe in which no universities are able to do something else is all the difference in the world.
Because if you pick a university at random and you free it from the forces that dictate what the consensus is and what is allowed to be considered, then that university will win.
Because what the other universities have done is they have signed up for basically methanol, right?
They've signed up for a brain killer, something that will not allow them to think clearly.
And if everybody is on board with that, then that could in theory be stable.
Now, of course, if all American universities sign up for brain poison, then, of course, that will put the universities of countries that don't subscribe to these same beliefs ahead.
So we are, in fact, opening the door to, for example, China taking over the special position that the West has held by virtue of the West self-sabotaging.
But OK, so you've got this question of zero.
If one university opts out and somehow figures out how to stay alive, then that will be the place that people send their kids if they want their kids actually to learn how to think.
That place will therefore produce graduates that are higher quality.
The products that they produce will be more innovative, more robust.
Everything will provide advantage to the products of the products and I mean the people that come from that university.
So it has to be zero.
In order to win the battle, it has to be zero.
Now, what I want to connect this to is that the same principle applies to social media, right?
If they're going to control the narrative on social media by dictating what is misinformation and what is factual and then having people thrown off for spreading what they call misinformation, Then it has to be all of the social media platforms, because if it wasn't, we would all end up finding the one platform in which this wasn't happening, right?
Now, if it is happening everywhere, what will happen is somebody will say, hey I'll start the platform where you can say anything you want.
OK.
Now you've just invented Parler.
And the attack vector is clear.
The attack vector is, OK, Parler is where the bad people are.
And so we at Amazon and Apple and Google are positioned to shut down the network of bad people, you know.
So, the concern is that Clubhouse is different, right?
Because Clubhouse actually invented a new way.
Instead of duplicating Twitter, what Clubhouse did was it invented a new way of interacting.
Now, there's nothing truly new about it.
It's just people talking to each other.
But the point is, because it was novel and useful and different, all sorts of people ended up there.
You can't very well accuse it of being the place where the bad people gather, because the bad people may be there, but they're there with all sorts of people who, you know, are well within Twitter's good graces.
So the point is this now has to be attacked one way or the other, right?
Somehow the place where conversations are taking place that can't go on on Twitter because Twitter has been effective at shaping the narrative and is increasingly aggressive.
And so, of course, the New York Times, you know, said out loud this last week exactly the thing that is supposed to be said only quietly within certain rooms.
And they suggested that Clubhouse was a place where unfettered conversations were taking place.
Now, that is an amazing, an amazing misstep on their part, acknowledging that at some level there's something troubling about people freely exchanging ideas.
Well, so I pulled up their tweet.
Oh wait.
So this is their tweet about it.
Unfettered conversations are taking place on Clubhouse, an invitation-only app that lets people gather in audio chat rooms.
The platform has exploded in popularity despite grappling with concerns over harassment, misinformation and privacy.
They got seriously ratioed here, and they got five times as many comments as they do likes on this thing, although a lot of retweets as well.
I don't know how many quote tweets, but I just searched when I was looking for their article.
I searched on the New York Times page for the word unfettered, And one of the things I found was December 23rd, 2011, Unfettered was the word of the day at the New York Times, and their definition is simply not bound by shackles and chains.
So that strikes me as As free of connotation, actually.
And if anything, it has a positive connotation.
So I don't think, I don't think a focus on this word.
I mean, it's possible they've edited the article originally, like, I don't know what all has gone behind the scenes of the New York Times.
But I'm not sure what the hubbub is about this word.
Oh, the hubbub is very well deserved.
For one thing, the report came from somebody who's been traveling on Clubhouse and has been, you know, a tattletale nanny hall monitor type.
So the point is in this context, yes, maybe in 2011, unfettered was a word without such connotations, but at the moment, this has everything to do with an intense fervor for regulating speech.
And my point would be free speech is effectively a synonym for unfettered conversation.
They are supposed to mean the identical thing.
And Zach, could you bring up the governmental news release that I sent you?
So, unfortunately, can you make it bigger?
OK, so this is the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, which has once again summoned the CEOs of tech platforms to answer for what it calls the misinformation and disinformation plaguing online platforms.
Right.
So this has a very definite valence to it.
And I want to put this in a new context.
Here we have the government castigating and interrogating CEOs of platforms that do have the ability to censor, because they are not covered by the First Amendment, because they are private.
Whether that should be or shouldn't be, we can discuss and should discuss.
But the fact is, for the moment, they have the ability to censor.
Their terms of service are absolutely opaque, unfollowable, and therefore you can be tossed off at will, which has happened to me, of course.
But I would argue that this here, with the House committee in the hands of the blue team, Putting forth this news release in which it creates the impression that misinformation and disinformation are plaguing online platforms.
Now, I'm not saying that there is not a tremendous amount of misinformation and disinformation on online platforms as there is, you know, discussed in every restaurant in, you know, the world.
Misinformation is a part of human communication.
But what they are doing is they are effectively Using something that I will call the Five Eyes Gambit.
The Five Eyes are five nations that conspired to subvert constitutional protections.
The five nations are the U.S., Canada, U.K., New Zealand, and Australia, I believe.
And the idea was in the U.S.
there are strict prohibitions against spying on U.S.
citizens.
But those prohibitions don't apply, for example, to the Brits.
They can spy on U.S.
citizens.
So to the extent that these countries wanted to spy on their own citizens, they could basically unionize, spy on each other's citizens and exchange the information.
Voila!
No more constitutional protections, right?
So what's going on here… Spying circle jerk.
It's a spying circle jerk.
Okay, so what's going on here?
The government, right?
And it'd be pretty hard to deny that the House Committee on Energy and Commerce is not part of the government.
The government is forbidden to regulate speech.
So what's it going to do?
It is going to threaten these online platforms and get them to regulate speech, right?
Is that a violation of the First Amendment?
Thematically, it is very specifically a violation of the First Amendment.
Is it exempt because of the one-step-removed nature of it?
Right?
I think it, you know, that's the argument that's going to be made.
But the real point is, even the title of the article that you quoted, It never stops to engage the question of why it is that speech is protected the way it is in spite of the fact that there is lots of misinformation contained in speech, inherently so, right?
Why did the founders protect abhorrent speech?
They did so because the net value of keeping speech free in spite of abhorrent speech is positive, remains positive.
This is something we all understood until yesterday to use Douglas Murray's formulation.
And so we are about to lose this because everybody does understand that misinformation spreads online and that bad things happen as a result of it, right?
But if that's all you focus on, then you think, well, great, let's just shut down the misinformation.
But what we don't do is ever get to the question of what is a fact?
There are certain facts you can check, right?
But the number of things that would be claimed to be factual that are not actually factual, the number of places where something that would have been claimed to be factual is forced to be reversed on the basis that people doggedly point out the evidence that it was not indeed true, you're going to shut down that mechanism.
In other words, this is the end of thought.
This is the beginning of, here's your predigested narrative, now take it.
It's certainly the end of public thought.
And it sends all of the not quite fitting into established ideological framework thought underground into private.
And that means that at the moment, with COVID lockdowns, there's going to be a lot less of it.
But that will drive underground both the necessary, important, actually discovering of reality that will help us survive into, you know, the next century thought.
from happening.
And it will also drive the actual hateful, fringe, disgusting thought underground out of view such that when it explodes onto the scene later, you know, everyone's going to act surprised like you did this to us.
Like, what is language actually, if not a place and a way to explore things that some of which are true, some of which aren't, and many of which we don't yet know?
This is the point.
The idea that we, you know, it is just such hubris.
It is, there's such an arrogance to this perspective.
That we already know everything about what is true and right and just, and you can trust us to just keep your frail, fragile brains away from all the stuff that we already know isn't true and is dangerous.
Like, that is not, you know, if any society that did that went extinct quickly.
That's what happened.
Yep.
You absolutely can't do this.
And I just, you know, we could go on, literally we could go on for days coming up with examples of things that if you allow the fact checkers to decide what we can discuss with each other, we'll be frozen in place and we will never actually make the jump to what turns out to be true in the end.
And I would point out just, you know, an example.
Kerry Mullis, the inventor of PCR, won a Nobel Prize for PCR.
PCR being one of the most powerful techniques in molecular biology, right?
He had doubts that HIV caused AIDS.
These were not preposterous, delusional doubts.
Now, he was wrong, I believe.
He was factually wrong.
But the point is, you had a super genius, right?
Somebody who brought a tremendous amount of value to the world.
Who could not falsify in his mind the idea that HIV and AIDS might be two distinct phenomena that co-travel enough that we can fool ourselves into believing one is causal of the other.
Now, do you want to do the same thing to him that they're doing to Bobby Kennedy Jr.? ?
You know, is Carey Mullis, you know, a crazed, unreliable scientific source because he holds a belief that is in fact potentially dangerous?
You need to protect yourself from HIV if you don't want to get AIDS.
And so, you know, there's no denying that if this is indeed a wrong hypothesis of his, that it has potential consequences for human life and limb.
But the point is, no, we have to take the package that is Carey Mullis rather than say, oh, you're not entitled to think because you sometimes do it wrong.
Well, guess what?
We all sometimes do it wrong.
Notorious HIV AIDS denier, Kerry Mullis.
Right.
Right.
Exactly.
And then the other thing is I'm just stunned by the fact that we are having this discussion about stamping out misinformation at the same time that we are having this unusual discussion about the lab leak origin hypothesis for COVID-19, which is the rare case where, in fact, an idea that many wanted to stamp out a year ago doesn't die.
And we are in fact, You know, managing to convince people that it is a viable hypothesis, which it clearly is.
So, you know, again, do you want to stop that conversation?
Because frankly, if you'd stop that conversation, we'd all still believe it was pangolins.
And we now know it wasn't pangolins.
And, you know, that's normal.
Hypothesizing that it was pangolins on the basis of some evidence, that's a totally normal phenomenon.
Discovering that that actually doesn't make sense in light of the fact that, for example, Pangolins don't normally get coronaviruses, and the coronavirus that we have, COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, doesn't infect them effectively, right?
Those things have to update our model.
And the point is, if you think that the model is just something you get in a software update, and it's fully packaged, and the facts are what they are, And we can just shut down, you know, all of the messiness that is outside of the established consensus?
Well, you don't have the first thing, you don't have the first bit of knowledge about how we got here.
The magic of civilization involves the messiness.
That's why the First Amendment looks the way it does, and it's why it has to apply in one way or another to the tech platforms.
Absolutely.
So I don't have it to show, but also this week I believe the Wikipedia entry for the lab leak hypothesis was actually taken down, right?
We do have it to show.
It was fact-checked out of existence by what turns out to be a small band of motivated activists.
Okay, so you I guess had this pulled up.
Uh, so this is, there was for a brief time a COVID-19 lab leak hypothesis.
Notice the phrasing, not lab leak theory, lab leak hypothesis page that very responsibly chronicled the evidence for the lab leak hypothesis.
And it was taken down as a result of an incessant and very powerful campaign by a small number of people behind the scenes.
There is some evidence that that campaign involved what would be called a water army.
A water army being a Chinese phenomenon in which people are hired to make social media posts that sway opinion.
So this is a known phenomenon.
And there is... I assume that happens all the time.
I've never heard the term water army before.
I think it does happen all the time.
And I think water army applies specifically to the Chinese version of it, which has been large scale.
You know, the Chinese have taken a very aggressive stance with respect to what is tolerated on the internet and there is a battle over various platforms in which Chinese people exchange information under the radar.
But in any case...
I guess, sorry, one thing that I do not understand about this conversation is, and I think I said this on the last episode, it's easy to try to smear those of us who are talking about it as if it's because we're anti-Chinese, we're xenophobic.
And I think actually, if this does turn out to have been a leak as a result of gain-of-function research at this lab in Wuhan, That points the finger, if you go back just a little bit more, more at American science and scientists and the NIH and such than it does to China.
And not to say that, you know, China, if this is true, would not have been involved in a cover-up and all of this, but the idea that this would make China look bad, it would look It would make a lot of virologists look bad, and the whole program of gain-of-function research and serial passaging look bad.
Potentially, it would reveal to us the downstream effects of the moratorium that the Obama administration put in place precisely because of the risks of this research, and the mistake, presumably, that it was for the Trump administration to raise the moratorium.
It makes a whole lot of people look bad, and I don't feel like China is really special on that list.
Well, it's becoming special, because it is behaving in an obstructionist fashion with respect to the investigation of this hypothesis.
Well, but the Who's given them complete cover, though.
Right.
I agree.
This does not start out… In fact, I've got a piece of an interview here to share, as you wanted me to, on that topic.
Okay.
Well, let's finish this out, though.
Okay.
Let's take your challenge here and just notice in a world in which we are going to decide that scientific consensus is the arbiter of what is a fact, then let's map the lab leak hypothesis question onto it and note the very dangerous circumstance we find ourselves in.
Either SARS-CoV-2 is an escapee from the lab or it isn't.
If it is an escapee from the lab in Wuhan, then it suggests something about the danger of escapes, that you can effectively crash the world economy and, you know, kill millions of people by accident because, you know, maybe you were doing what you thought was honorable research, but that research, you know, the cost-benefit analysis wasn't what you thought it was.
Either that's true.
Or it did come from nature.
If it came from nature, these things can potentially hop out at any time and crash the world economy and kill millions of people, et cetera, et cetera.
So the point is either – the implication is either we shouldn't have been doing this research because the danger was way too big or we should have been doing it sooner and bigger and more labs and all of that stuff.
So the point is the decision... It's not just a conflict of interest.
It's like, you know, thrive or die.
It's not just like continue to eke out a fragile existence or go down screaming.
It's like you're going to either become the most important types of researchers in the world, or you are going to be recognized as having done the research that helped spur the world into a global pandemic and economic collapse.
Those who created this research program, and this was an international effort, those who created it are either the heroes or the villains of this story, right?
And the idea that we are now going to fight that out on the basis of, well, if it's a consensus and it's in Wikipedia, then it's a fact and everything else can't be discussed on social media Well, what's going on, you know, at Wikipedia?
Well, when you look behind the scenes, you have people openly discussing The best tactics for sustaining the attack, that is to say, you know, berating people to the point that they ultimately give up, is being discussed as a tactic in the editing part of Wikipedia.
So the point is, this doesn't have anything to do with facts.
This has to do with people who want that entry down for their own reasons, whatever they may be, shaping what the world takes to be a factual reference.
Now the fact is, I use Wikipedia all the time.
It does, there's certain kinds of things that you can, you know, go in there, you know, if you want to look up, you know, the chemical constituents of a particular, you know, molecule, there's a pretty good chance you can find it in there, and the chances that that's subject to some sort of political wrangling are pretty low, right?
But there are other things on which there's a lot at stake in which you just can't rely on it as a factual reference, and there's no mechanism.
Hence, we're stuck with what we call misinformation.
The thing that scares me most of all is that the ratio of misinformation to high quality heterodox information is probably a thousand to one.
On a good day, right?
The high quality heterodox information is buried in a sea of garbage.
And if you get people to focus on the sea of garbage and you say, wouldn't you like to be free of this thousand pieces of bad information?
Wouldn't the world be better off without them?
Well, maybe it would be, but you can't get rid of them without getting rid of the secret sauce, which is the one in a thousand pieces that you absolutely need to chase down and doesn't have the defense of, hey, this is a fact and we all agree on it.
All right.
Should we?
I think we're there.
Well, we're not there.
You wanted me to share this thing from Science from February 14th.
Politics was always in the room.
Who, mission chief, reflects on China trip seeking COVID-19's origin?
So this is an interview by Science, one of the two most important scientific journals in the world.
With the mission leader Peter Ben Embarek, who we haven't heard as much from because Peter Daszak was sort of the, I don't know, self-appointed, otherly appointed spokesperson, mostly.
But let us just go to a few of these questions.
Here we go.
Question.
At Friday's press conference in Geneva, Ted Ross seemed to contradict you by saying that with respect to the origins of SARS-CoV-2, quote, all hypotheses are on the table.
Was it a mistake to call the lab origin hypothesis extremely unlikely?
Embaric answers, no.
We first developed a pathway of all the possible ways the virus could be introduced into the human population in late 2019.
A lab accident is one hypothesis.
Another is the direct introduction from an animal host, and others are different versions of intermediary hosts.
For each hypothesis, we tried to put facts on the table, look at what we had in terms of arguments, and then make an assessment of each.
It was already a big step to have Chinese colleagues assess and evaluate such a hypothesis based on what we had on the table, which was not much.
Yes, lab accidents do happen around the world.
They have happened in the past.
The fact that several laboratories of relevance are in and around Wuhan and are working with coronavirus is another fact.
Beyond that, we didn't have much in terms of looking at that hypothesis as a likely option.
So like asterisk, yes you did.
But okay, let's go back into the interview for a moment.
Question.
But what led you to use the extremely unlikely label?
Did you learn anything that made it less likely?
Answer, again in Barak speaking.
We should not put too much focus on the wording.
We were looking at different options.
At some point, we were thinking, should we use a ranking, with 1 being the most unlikely, 5 the most likely, or should we use colors?
Or should we find another scale?
We ended up with a 5-phrase scale.
Extremely unlikely, unlikely, possible, likely, and very likely.
It's more an illustration of where these hypotheses are to help us organize our planning of future studies.
Question.
But my question is whether you learned anything new in China.
Now that you've been there, do you have more reason to say it's extremely unlikely than before?
Translation.
Answer my damn question, dude!
Answer.
Again.
Embark.
Yes.
We had long meetings with the staff of the Wuhan Institute of Virology and three other laboratories in Wuhan.
I can't even do this with a straight face.
They talked about these claims openly.
We discussed, what did you do over the past year to dismiss this claim?
What did you yourself develop in terms of argumentations?
Did you do audits yourself?
Did you look at your records?
Did you test your staff?
And they explained how they worked and what kind of audit system they had.
They had retrospectively tested serum from their staff.
They tested samples from early 2019 and from 2020.
There were a lot of discussions that we could not have had if we had not traveled to Wuhan.
We also did not have evidence provided by outsiders to support any of the claims out there.
That could potentially have tipped the balance.
What we saw and discussed gave us much more confidence in our assessment.
The consensus was that this is an unlikely scenario.
We also had difficulties designing future studies to look into the laboratory claims within our joint group, because if you want to explore such a hypothesis further, you need a different mechanism.
You need to do a formal audit, and that's far beyond what our team is mandated to do or has the tools and capabilities to do.
So that was also a reason why we could not start moving forward in our next series of studies into that direction.
But the fact that the hypothesis is listed or assessed as extremely unlikely is not the same as if it had been listed or assessed as impossible.
We're not closing the door.
We're not closing the door because it's swollen and we can't get it to close.
Oh my god!
Yeah, I mean, it's really, it's like... Sorry, but like, we looked at a number of different schemes, and you know, probably you wouldn't be upset with us if we just said it was purple, instead of highly unlikely.
Like, you know, we thought about using language, and we thought about using colors, and we thought about using, like, just because we landed on this scheme doesn't really mean anything.
It's like, yes, but it does!
What are you talking about?
We thought about having a guy with a uniform stand there and say, nothing to see here, folks, go on home.
Yeah, don't look at the man behind the curtain.
There's infinite numbers of versions of like, what are you doing?
You're not compelling.
This is not a compelling interview.
Now, interestingly, let us compare this.
Hey, Zach, do you want to put up the… I sent you a paper.
This is not a peer-reviewed paper, but it takes the form of a manuscript, and it is by… authors who actually have advanced a, so this is Latham and Wilson.
And this paper is basically an analysis of how likely it is that China, that there is a natural origin intermediate to be found, which was a large part of the discussion that we did last week.
And And they attempt to quantify the chances and actually this analysis, although I'm going to argue that it is flawed.
I think it is flawed in a way that the natural scientific process would cause their estimate to be refined.
But the analysis centers on some very interesting and important pieces of evidence.
One of them being phylogenetic and the other geographic.
Okay.
Right?
And the point is, the point of the analysis is that if you...
Look at the chances of patient zero showing up in Wuhan and the chances that the coronavirus that becomes a pandemic is a beta coronavirus from this particular group, that is to say from the same group as generated SARS-CoV-1, the initial SARS, that the chances, they calculate the chance.
If you scroll down here, Zach, scroll down to near the end of the article.
Keep going.
Slow down.
Scroll back up a little bit.
Well, I can't quite find it, but they calculate the They calculate the number if you combine the like oh there it is one in 630 that it will be in Wuhan and one in 28 that it will be a close relative of the original SARS and they calculate the combined number at one in 17,640.
Now I think their number is probably off by an order of magnitude but you know It is nonetheless an impressive degree.
And, you know, at some point I wouldn't mind talking with the authors of this about how I would alter their methodology to make it more robust.
But the point is the likelihood calculation is so far away that they actually conclude, if you can go back to it, in the next paragraph.
Okay, scroll down just a little bit.
Okay, here, the last sentence of the next paragraph says, a lab escape should at this point be the default hypothesis, which people who listened last week will remember was one of the arguments that we made, which is that effectively, because there is substantial evidence for A laboratory leak, and because there is not evidence of a natural intermediate, that in fact LabLeak has the status of the null hypothesis at this point.
In other words, it is possible it came from nature, but that puts the burden on those who would argue that to find the intermediate, and absent that intermediate, the one plausible intermediate that we have is the laboratory.
Yeah, I'm not familiar with this paper, this is the first time I've seen it, but I'm liking what I see here, actually the first part of that paragraph you just read the last sentence from.
The criticism will doubtless be made that the geographic and the phylogenetic evidence described here are circumstantial, mere coincidences.
But critiquing evidence as circumstantial is based on a common logical misconception, that circumstantial evidence represents a special category of evidence.
As the philosopher David Hume first argued, all evidence of causation is composed of coincidences.
All an observer can do is to add up the coincidences until they surmise that the threshold of reasonable doubt has been surpassed.
Conclusions are always provisional, but in the absence of evidence to the contrary, anyone open to persuasion ought at this point to conclude that the probability of 17,640 to 1 far exceeds that threshold.
A lab escape should at this point be the default hypothesis.
Now I see there that they've alighted a key part of the scientific process in their description there, right?
Like that if you have the hypothesis before you find the, you know, we have talked about this with regard to correlation and causation, right?
Correlation does not imply causation unless you predicted it in advance, right?
And so their sort of approach from Hume-centric as opposed to more like Bacon, Francis Bacon-centric, which is, you know, our sort of original approach converge, I think, right?
And so they land as well on this conclusion about what the default should be.
And so this makes so many of the right points because for one thing, People who've been with these live streams since the beginning will remember the very early period as we were trying to sort out what we were learning about coronavirus and the field, all of the fields involved in this discussion had moved into a mode where because there wasn't time for normal peer review, you couldn't wait a year all of the fields involved in this discussion had moved into a mode where because there wasn't time We were just working from the stuff on the archives, right?
Now the stuff on the archives is... The pre-print servers.
So archive was the name of one of the pre-print servers.
The preprint servers, which are not yet peer-reviewed.
Basically, it's a place to lodge papers that take the right form but haven't been through that process.
But it made for a very vibrant discussion in which many more people had access to the tools.
It was messy.
There was lots of wrong stuff there, right?
So it didn't have the kind of quality control And increasingly, as we've talked about before here, peer review acts as these latter-day fact-checkers where they're motivated to, you know, to a particular kind of research type of conclusion, people in particular that they want to have published, etc.
Right.
Now, what I would point out is that this paper, which as far as I know, is not peer-reviewed.
It takes the form of a peer reviewed paper, but it's published in a source that doesn't peer review, I think.
It is logically evaluatable.
I have concerns about the way it was done.
And one of the conclusions is interesting.
So these people advanced a hypothesis earlier that the intermediate was the one of the miners in the Yunnan mine from which samples were taken.
And they have a A model in which the lungs of that minor basically served as a serial passage experiment.
And I don't think this can be the case, but it is a viable hypothesis.
One of the minors who died?
I actually don't think it matters.
I don't think we know.
What we don't have is any evidence that those minors transmitted the virus to anybody.
So if it, you know, if it is a lab, so their idea is it's a lab leak.
And that the sample was transmitted to the lab from which it leaked, but the sample was enhanced in the lungs of these miners through a natural evolutionary process.
I don't believe that this can be the case.
Why?
Well, for a number of reasons.
One, I believe that the selection... A, I don't believe that there's enough room for that selection to have taken place in a single individual, but their argument... Well, and this is part of why I asked you, and one of the ones who...
But as I understood it, I thought that there were only, you know, a handful of people who got it and they all died.
Six, three died.
Okay.
So, you know, this would, this seems more plausible to me if it's from the lungs of one of the miners who survived and therefore it may have had more, basically more generations in which to evolve within the lungs of that miner.
Yeah, I agree.
Although if we're talking about SARS-CoV-2, You know, then we're talking about something that the immune system does get wise to and, you know, ultimately wins that battle.
So anyway, we can talk about it.
I agree that if you lived, there was a longer period of time potentially for that evolution to take place.
But I don't believe a single minor's lungs are going to be enough.
I remain to be convinced of whether that's true.
But here's the other problem.
There are two factors in the amazing capacity of SARS-CoV-2 at the point it shows up and hits the ground running in Wuhan, right?
It's very good at invading tissues, and it's very good at getting between individuals.
All of the selection in the minors' lungs would have been in favor of invading tissues.
It would not be super well adapted to jump from between people.
And as far as we know, it didn't go between tissues either.
Didn't go between individuals, didn't go between tissues.
Well, that would certainly be an interesting question.
I don't think we know that that's true because they died of what was called I don't think it was even called viral pneumonia.
It was understood to be a pneumonia.
We now know it was a viral pneumonia.
Yeah.
But it would be very interesting to know, you know, what a full necropsy would have revealed about what other tissues were affected.
Yeah.
There's a lot that could be settled if we had those samples, which I believe we just simply don't.
And they might actually exist in somebody's freezer somewhere, which is another reason that we need to answer this question.
Right.
But nonetheless, these authors Say they do exactly the right thing.
They lay out all of their work, right?
That work can be evaluated.
I believe that they are off by something like a factor of 10, which still leaves a very impressive, you know, 1760 to one burden, which is way or indication of direction, which is, you know, I've only gone, I've said, I think it's 90% or above.
That's well above that.
But in any case, The natural process can now unfold here, outside of those who would fetter the conversation.
Right?
We can, yeah.
Darn those fetterers.
I always liked how he played.
Well, I mean, he's gifted, but nonetheless, he's not a hero of free speech.
Maybe.
I don't know.
Sorry, Roger.
That was uncalled for on my part.
As far as I know, you might be a hero for Eastbridge.
I'm just not aware of it.
But in any case, we can now have the discussion and say, look, here's how I would modify your method so that your approximation of the chances of this having happened by random would be more accurate.
Might be I'm wrong.
We'll find out, you know, might be they're wrong, they adjust their number, we could get a better number.
But the point is, it's still a pretty impressive, the analysis itself, you know, how you numeritize it.
Is that a word?
No.
No.
Okay, I propose numeritize becomes a word.
But, but, okay.
How you quantify it, how you quantify it.
It is an open question, but the analysis itself is, I believe, logically robust and very persuasive.
And it suggests the burden of proof, therefore, you know, we are borrowing.
So you don't see any sign errors?
You think the size of the estimate is off?
I think the size of the estimate is off, but the point is the estimate is so profound that even at a tenth their strength, it's still overwhelming.
It's still remarkable.
And then I think the question about, you know, they say there are four lab leak hypotheses.
It is very likely that their estimate on the strength of that likelihood is that it is one of these, and their point is we have advanced one.
It could be any of the four or another, but it's likely to be in that quadrant and not a natural origin.
And that is certainly an excellent place to have a high quality scientific discussion.
All right.
Well, given that it's two o'clock here already now, we still need to talk about dung beetles.
Maybe we should move on.
Yep.
Okay.
Zachary, while you're showing a video, we can talk over it, right?
Because there's no sound really in the video.
Oh, you can mute it.
I mean, there's sound of rustling.
There could be interesting jungle noises.
Yeah, I think there's not.
Yeah, so this video is one I just took with my iPhone at Tipitini in the far western Amazon in Ecuador, like I said, 13 months ago when you and I were there for two and a half weeks working on our book and exploring and just generally being tropical biologists.
And, you know, you see this thing that is familiar to people who know nature documentaries of this beetle who has rolled up a nice perfectly spherical ball of poop and is backing it up.
And I think that's it.
I had a number of these, but I just sent Zach a 30 second So, dung beetles are almost worldwide, interestingly.
The scarabs like that one that are often really brilliantly colored.
I don't know if they're pantropical, but they're certainly neotropical.
I don't think the really brightly colored dung beetles tend to get into the temperate zone so much.
Like mangroves and sidewinders, which we discussed in episode 66, they are not just widespread, but convergent.
So this habit of finding poop and rolling it into balls and rolling it or funneling it or tunneling it or whatever, For personal use, did not evolve just once and adaptively radiate out into the world.
But this was convergently arrived upon solution to the problem of how to get resources and also what are we going to do with all this poop that we found by a number of different lineages of beetles.
So that alone is sort of interesting, right?
Like I hadn't thought too much about dung beetles, although every time I did a study abroad program there were a few students who wanted to do one of their one day, one or two day field exercises.
on the ecology of dung beetles, which would allow them, of course, to drop trousers and poop in the rainforest and wait for the dung beetles to arrive.
That's the easy way.
That's the easy way.
And, you know, they really are ubiquitous enough and driven enough by the smell of fresh excrement that you can reliably get dung beetles to come to fresh poop, at least in the Neotropics.
And in fact I should just point out there's an excellent book called Tropical Nature.
It's right there.
Tropical Nature here which has the proposal in it for this experiment.
In other words it proposes that if you're going to work in the tropics that you do take a poop in the woods and then step back and watch what happens because Things happen fast in tropical forests, right?
So this book, which is the subtitle of which is Life and Death in the Rainforest Substantial in South America, was always something I signed before we went on study abroad.
I think you would come upon this if you were trying to figure out what you might do for a day or two long project in the rainforest, and you've come to recognize that actually Monkeys are a problem because they move around all the time and you have to put them to sleep and then get up before they get up if you want any chance of finding them the next day, for instance.
Whereas if all you have to do is poop and wait, it's rather an easier project.
But this book is extraordinary.
But science this week.
The reason that I wanted to say anything about dung beetles right now is not because I was thinking about them otherwise, but science this week has this article.
It's not a research article.
It's a news article titled, Humble Dung Beetles May Be Ideal DNA Detectors for Animal Surveys.
And so I'm not going to read anything from it.
That's really all.
All right there.
And the idea is that a lot of what some types of biologists are doing, especially conservation biologists, is trying to establish who's where, like what species are in a particular area by doing these surveys.
And there's a lot of, you know, you can do audio surveys and you listen and you can You know, most, you know, you can do, you know, transects and, you know, you could do camera traps and, you know, lay cameras.
In fact, at Tipitini, Diego Mosquera, who had been the director at Tipitini and is now, I think, the director of research, He had one of the most extensive camera trap studies I've ever seen and maybe has been done to date in a tropical field situation.
And he caught, you know, there's like five species of cats and, oh boy, what is it, 10 or 12 species of monkeys?
He wasn't mostly seeing the monkeys because these were down low, but, you know, just an incredible number of, you know, charismatic megafauna that otherwise weren't being seen that he was finding with these um with these game cameras camera traps um but really rare stuff is really hard to find and uh we would like to know what what's out there
And one way to do it is being proposed as well is these dung beetles often are specifically collecting mammalian dung and the DNA of the mammals who shit out that dung remains viable as fragments of, you know, identifiable fragments of DNA from that species for apparently 48 hours.
After the dung beetle takes it in and so you have to sacrifice the beetle to get the DNA But it is being proposed and has just begun to be so they're not talking about using the dung balls themselves to get the DNA No, they're talking about using the stomach contents of the beetles now.
Why why not use the dung balls themselves?
Yeah, I don't know and it's not even explored here Yeah, probably because they're going to use light traps to get the beetles, and they're not going to be able to... finding the beetles is not going to be all that easy either.
It's going to be very labor-intensive, but putting up a UV light will... Well, no, actually, so you just landed on it.
Basically, just as I said... I just landed on it?
Just as, you know, our students and my students who were interested in looking at dung beetle ecology, in part because you can get them to come to you, they're not going to use light traps.
They're going to, you know, they're going to shit in the woods.
Really?
They're going to file that in their grant application?
Well, you know, it's at least implied in this little science news article.
Interesting.
Yeah.
Oh, okay.
Well, that's fascinating.
So, no doubt.
So, you know, finding dung beetles with balls is Dung balls is somewhat easy to do in at least a neotropical forest, and I've seen them in Madagascar too, but I've never spent really any time in the other tropical forests of the world.
But you can reliably, every single time, attract dung beetles with fresh poop.
You just can't.
Yeah.
No, that's true.
They'll find you.
They're not using light traps.
Okay, well, I would advise they use light traps, or at least say that that's what they're going to do in their grant application.
But I mean, I think in part, the whole reason that this is useful is, oh my god, any day we want, we can go and get dung beetles.
And light traps, you kill a lot of other insects, you attract a lot of stuff you don't want.
I don't even know to what degree dung beetles particularly come to light traps.
I'm trying to remember.
I've certainly been around enough light traps.
I believe they are actually relatively frequent, but I guess we'll find out.
I've seen scarabs, but I haven't seen... I don't know that I've seen dung beetles.
Scarabs, of course, is some giant category.
Well, anyway, I don't know.
To draw the circle a little closer here, though, Carrie Mollis invents PCR, no doubt the technique that they will use to amplify the little pieces of DNA from the dung beetles.
And so anyway, that technique is now everywhere, including COVID tests.
Indeed.
Indeed.
All right.
I think we've reached the end.
We have begun to show the picture that we'll use in the thumbnail at the end, but maybe we showed it early on.
Yeah, I think it's going to end up being one of those Ice Pictures or Drunk Without Power?
Drunk Without Power, yeah, it could be that one.
Alright, so we're going to take, for those of you watching, a 15-minute break and come back with a live Q&A.
Ask your questions in Super Chat now or in the next hour and we'll get to as many of them as we can.
For those of you listening, we will be back at the same time next week and hopefully, so we did not, we weren't able to put out the conversation that you had with someone who shall remain nameless until it comes out this last week because of our power outage, but hopefully you've now got two banked.
Yep, two conversations coming.
At least one of those is going to come out hopefully between now and next Saturday.
Please consider joining us at my Patreon for Dark Horse membership.
Right now the question asking period is open and not tomorrow, but next Sunday we'll have the two-hour private Q&A.
One little blip of last month's private Q&A is of Brett talking about his first hatched child, the crocodile.
Which I think I say on air, I wouldn't do this to you if it was going out to YouTube, and then you said, yeah, YouTube.
Yeah, why not?
You join Brett on his Patreon for conversations every month.
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Email our moderator darkhorse.moderator at gmail.com with logistical questions and Boy, there's probably other stuff, but I think I'm out.
Yep That's that's it.
We will I guess have the winner of the clubhouse invite by the top of the next hour Dr. Rolligator will be doing the choosing and you can tell him whether you want your name announced as the winner or kept secret.
