#69: Evolution of Power (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 69th 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 power, race and social media, specifically regarding the app Clubhouse. We talk about how Covid outcomes are affected by preexisting conditions, such as obesity and hypertension. We ask: should children be vaccinated, and are the reasons being proposed to do so justified? We review a ...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast livestream, our 69th Dr. Heather Hying, how goes it?
It goes pretty well.
How long have you, love?
Well, you know, it's going reasonably well.
A little hectic this week, as you know, but, you know, it's all happening.
We're still here.
Let's put it that way.
We are still here.
Those of you who are watching are apparently still here, or at least you're still there, wherever there may be.
Interesting, yes.
No, I think that's, uh, I think you nailed it.
It's, uh, fully described.
True and uninteresting.
True, possibly uninteresting.
Yes.
So, um, today we're going to talk about power, race, and social media, right?
We're going to talk about COVID mortality and pre-existing conditions a little bit.
Uh, we are going to review a truly sexist obituary and what we should do about it.
Um, and, uh, review a new finding in octopi or octopodes or octopuses.
They're all apparently legitimate pluralizations of octopus.
As luck would have it, I was speaking with Eric about, um, Octopi yesterday, and he prefers octopoids, which I think is legitimate.
That is not one of the ones that I ran into as I was looking for the proper pluralization.
I'm sure there are many, many, many, but the three that I just said are the most usual pluralizations of octopus.
Let us agree to drive everyone crazy with octopuses, which is... It's one of the legitimate pluralizations.
I know, but it drives everyone crazy because everybody feels sophisticated saying octopi, I think.
I'm going to go with octopodes then.
Octopodes.
All right.
Cool.
So first though, if you are interested in more Q&A after the Q&A that follows today's live stream, we are having our monthly two-hour private Q&A that you can access through my Patreon, Heather Hying, tomorrow at 11 a.m.
Pacific.
And next week you will have your Patreon conversations.
And there was maybe one more announcement before we launch into today.
Let's see.
There's at least one more announcement.
One is we will be giving away another Clubhouse invite to anyone who wants it.
They will be immediately useful to somebody who's got an iPhone.
Apparently it doesn't work on iPad, which strikes me as odd, but nonetheless.
Android is the Clubhouse app.
I have heard different.
You have heard different?
All right.
Well, I know nothing about this except that I have heard from people who are using iPads that it's working.
Okay, interesting.
I looked it up the other day and I could find no evidence of that, but I hope it does work on iPads.
But in any case, even if you have an Android phone, you're welcome to enter our drawing for this by entering the hashtag clubhouse in the chat and then a winner will be selected at the end of the broadcast.
Was that the other announcement?
Yep.
Alright, so then we've done it.
All right, let's um... I wanted to start out with you're giving me that look.
I'm just laughing.
But you're not thinking about divorce.
No.
Okay, good.
All right, then I'm cool with it.
I can handle the look.
So, all right, let's start out with a little consideration of power.
And I must tell you that I'm thinking about this because of an event that took place yesterday on Clubhouse.
And before you all change the channel, those of you who don't want to hear about Clubhouse... As I predicted some people would.
Right, and I get it.
I get it.
But here's what I want to tell you before you click away, right?
If somebody was to start talking to you about FaceMash in 2003, you could well have the correct reaction, I want no part of hearing about this.
That sounds awful and it's not something I'm interested in.
On the other hand, if you fast forward to 2021, And you realize that FaceMash becomes Facebook and, for better or worse, starts altering the way the world understands itself.
Then being in on that discussion early on... Well done.
Was it really called face mesh?
Yes.
Okay.
That's one point of order.
Second is, just because the thing became important doesn't mean that everything that happens on it in its early instantiation is important.
Also, what about my place or whatever my space was called before?
I have no idea what any of these things were called and obviously most of them are disappeared.
So, you know, I mean, you and I, this is actually one of the places that you and I differ the most.
Like, I am, I hold myself intentionally at arm's length from almost all of the new stuff in order to retain my ability to think clearly and do creative work over in this space.
Like, I just don't want that polluting my head.
So, I am not buying into the, like, obviously you need to pay attention to anything.
You heard about FaceMash?
Seriously, FaceMash?
Yeah, I think so.
I think so.
I'm not saying anything.
Like so many things that matter, the vast bulk of what takes place there, and even one of the strengths of the platform, is the ephemeral nature of what takes place there.
We're talking about Facemesh now?
No, we are now talking about Clubhouse.
But my point is, Clubhouse doesn't know what it is yet.
Even the people who've programmed it don't really know what it's going to end up being.
At the moment, it appears to be crashing into podcast world, right?
We have all sorts of people coming through.
Last week, Bill Gates was on, Sam Harris was on, earlier we had Joe Rogan, Elon Musk has been there, and all of these things have played out very differently.
I would say Bill Gates told us nothing we didn't already know from Bill Gates.
On the other hand, Elon Musk interacted, as you might imagine, as somebody who is a denizen of the new online world, right?
He actually participated with people.
So anyway, something is happening there, and it's figuring out what it is.
And my point is, even if your understanding is that this is just a bad development, which it may well be, It's a development that is going to have a profound impact on your life, even if it's not Clubhouse.
Now it happens that Facebook and Twitter are now competing directly with Clubhouse.
Clubhouse having discovered that there is apparently a hunger for conversations that are somewhere between Twitter space and podcast space.
And so there's this jockeying for position.
And my point is, even if it's all bad, right?
What it is going to be is unfolding.
And, you know, it's very hard to move Twitter or Facebook now, right?
They're too powerful.
They're too big.
But in the early days, the community that was there had influence.
So, again, I don't want to be in the position of defending this.
This may be the next level of derangement of civilization that's coming.
But at the moment, it's happening in real time.
It's changing.
I think both are likely.
Could well be, could well be.
In any case, the event, so let me just set the stage for those who have not paid any attention to what Clubhouse is.
Zach, do you want to put up that screenshot I sent you?
Okay, so this is not the room in which things went insane yesterday.
This is a room that is actually, I think, currently on Clubhouse.
Contains some good people, some people I know.
Maceo there is somebody.
Well familiar, you see a nice mixed group of people, men, women, racially mixed.
In any case, these guys, I don't know what's going on in this room, but these people are running some sort of an experiment about how to affect room dynamics, right?
Okay, so yesterday what took place, so what you see on the screen... Have you said, like, since I have not been on it, I don't think you have said that it's voice only and that it's ephemeral.
I mean, maybe you said it was ephemeral.
I'm about to explain it.
So there are rooms.
The rooms that you see to go into are rooms that involve people that you follow.
There is a wrinkle that there's the ability to block people.
And I think if anybody on the stage has blocked you, you don't even see that a room is available.
And inside the room, there are two... there are really three, but for our purposes, there are two levels.
There's a stage.
Anybody on the stage can talk at any time that they want.
People in the audience cannot talk.
In general, people in the audience can click the button in the lower right-hand corner and ask to come on the stage, and the moderators have discretion over whether or not to bring them up.
So that's the dynamic.
What happened yesterday is that Michael Tracy the journalist started a room in when the title was approximately Is clubhouse too obsessed with wokeism or something like that?
in any case I Went into this room quite late.
I think the discussion was well underway Michael Tracy was I believe having difficulty moderating the room and A person came onto the stage to speak and challenged the fact that there were, by her accounting, no people of color with moderator privileges.
Michael Tracy made her a moderator.
I did not see that interaction, but that's what I've been told.
And then a coup took place, and everybody in the room acknowledged by the end of this discussion that it was a coup.
So the person who had been given moderator privileges first kicked Michael Tracy off the stage, then kicked all white people off the stage, and the conversation radically shifted.
So it was a takeover.
Now, at one level, who cares about some takeover in some ephemeral room on Clubhouse?
On the other hand, The nature of clubhouse is a discussion and What took place in that room was stunning not just to me but to many people including Peter Bogosian who was in the audience and Benjamin Boyce now I would just point out that Peter Bogosian Benjamin Boyce and myself are Three very well-versed people when it comes to discussions of
Wokeness, racial interactions, right?
It would be hard to impress us, and yet all three of us were impressed with what took place in this room.
It was shocking.
Impressed in a negative way.
Tremendously negative.
And my suspicion is that most people have not heard a conversation like this one.
And so in any case, I think probably Peter and Benjamin and I are going to have to discuss what took place there in order that people can get any real deep sense of what it was.
But what was just fascinating was The fact that although in general there is a wide diversity of opinions in any clubhouse conversation above a few people, the diversity of opinion dropped to zero.
And what happened was increasingly outlandish things were asserted on the stage with no objection from anybody, which spoke to what I'm going to claim is a kind of power.
And one of the obvious results of this will be that anyone who is on Clubhouse and paying attention to it and who knows what you just described, a moderator who is chastised, who is asked to add someone else based on a demographic, May well not do so in the future.
And so, legitimate inquiries about increasing diversity that might be legitimate, although we can put aside for the moment whether or not seeking diversity across demographic features is going to maximize conversation quality, But that this is likely to cause exactly the opposite thing.
This is going to quite literally silo people more because future conversations by moderators who have created a group around them of people who, because it's who they know, look somewhat like them in some regard.
If a woman says, you need a woman on the stage, or a black person says, you need a black person on the stage, those moderators We now have legitimate reason to be concerned that what is happening is not good faith, but is actually a coup attempt.
So perfect.
You've just described the birth of a Kafka trap.
Right.
You're now damned if you do and damned if you don't.
And so that, of course, is a very dangerous dynamic.
Right.
Right.
One certainly wants.
And in fact, in general, people have been pretty generous with moderator privileges.
And in general, the rooms are pretty well served by having a fair number of people from different perspectives have those privileges.
But obviously, if anybody can kick anyone off the stage and you know, I mean, So the idea is that any moderator has as complete a set of privileges as any other moderator, regardless of whether or not you set up the room or just, you know, just added.
Exactly.
And so this then goes to... Imminently gameable.
So gameable.
And so I wanted to think out loud a little bit on the question of What is power because what I saw yesterday take place over I mean I was in the room for I don't know three plus hours What I saw took place was a clear demonstration of power and in fact the very first thing that took place in the immediate aftermath of this coup I think I'm shortchanged the story just a little bit
Was that a bunch of people on the stage, and it's very hard to tell when many people are trying to speak at once who is speaking.
It is relatively easy to tell when one person is speaking at a time, and rooms differ as to whether or not people talk over each other or wait their turn.
But in this case, many people appeared to raise their voice.
And tried to prevent this ushering of people off the stage.
They wanted a room in which there was room to disagree.
All of those people were eliminated.
So what you had was inside of, I don't know, maybe it was 30 seconds, you had a stage that was diverse become, at least at a racial level, become segregated.
So segregation happened in this room almost instantly.
Well, but frankly more importantly at an ideological level.
Exactly.
That's the thing.
It's not only was it racially segregated, but it was limited to those people who were apparently, and this became apparent over the course of hours, were apparently willing to sign on To anything offered by anyone in the room, including completely preposterous ideas.
I mean, if John McWhorter or Coleman Hughes or Thomas Chatterjee Williams or Chloe Valdary or, you know, any number of other, you know, smart black people had shown up and said, I'd like to come up on the stage, I don't think they would have been welcome.
By your account of what it sounds like was happening.
Right.
In fact, John McWhorter was misportrayed on the stage.
He was portrayed as a conservative, not surprising.
But he was portrayed that way.
I was brought up, somebody noticed me in the audience, I was brought up basically to be cross-examined.
You mean brought up to the stage or mentioned?
Yes.
I was brought up to the stage and I was asked if I was a white supremacist.
Oh, this again.
It's almost the four-year anniversary, why not play this game again?
Well, but this is exactly it.
And so, whatever else we can say about this environment, at one level, this was a lot like the ability of somebody, imagine a virtual, I'm not a fan of virtual reality, I'm very frightened about what it's going to do to people's cognition over time, but imagine virtual reality that would allow you
To teleport into the evergreen riots with no physical safety issue But the ability to be first person in that situation How much would that do for people's understanding of whether this was or wasn't an important event whether it was or wasn't being misrepresented?
Right that ability to just be present is very persuasive and so I have the sense, frankly, that people generally, people on both the woke and the anti-woke side, would have their viewpoint altered by, you know, the ability to participate in this conversation, even just to sit in the audience and hear it taking place in front of them.
Would I think convince a great many people that something important was going on and many people I expect even on the woke side would have the sense of actually I don't want any part of that, right?
Because all of those claims are, I don't want to say all, although frankly virtually every claim that was made was extraordinary.
Okay, so what's to be done then?
Yeah, so this thing was ephemeral, and you saw it firsthand.
It's hardly the first time you've seen this firsthand, and so did Benjamin Boyce.
It's not his first time at the rodeo either.
No.
Peter Boghossian, same thing, you know.
Same thing.
And I presume I know less about Michael Tracy, but I believe that he knows enough about this to have recognized, at least in retrospect, what was happening.
Um, so, you know, you were not further informed.
Um, there, you, you think there would be value in people, um, in other people who did not choose to be there in hearing or reading, um, this, this thing that was ephemeral.
What, what then, you know, what does it mean or what value can be derived from it?
All right, so, uh, for one thing, Um, let's just say, Peter was actually tweeting about this, this morning, about this conversation, and his point was, the constant refrain in this discussion, or at least the recurrent refrain, was that it all must be burned down.
That this is effectively, that civilization... All, oh, civilization must be burned down.
Civilization is effectively white, and that whiteness taints it beyond repair, and it must be burned down.
Now my point is, for the vast majority of people who have had it, right?
Who have had it, and may be marching with BLM, the discovery that there is at least a contingent wielding substantial power, whose viewpoint is actually our purpose is to burn this down, and then things will be better, because they can't be worse.
That discovery, the discovery that a great many people who call themselves abolitionists, whether they are talking about prisons or the police or generally both, that abolitionists have taken that honorable term and basically turned it on its head and think it's clever to un-invent civilization and imagine that somehow that will improve things, that that would be a wake-up call that would actually allow us, it would be the gateway to the actual conversation.
That we need to be having.
And so this brings me back to the question of power.
So loosely speaking, I would say power is the ability to reallocate or redirect limited resources, right?
Whether that is people's time, whether it is their attention, whether it is money, right?
whether it is access to a coveted spot in a school, in an organization, whatever it is, the ability to reallocate a limited resource is power.
Now my point is power, tremendous power, is being wielded by a movement that is composed of people who actually have positions that cannot be reconciled with each other.
The burn it all down people are a substantial contingent, but there are lots of people who would not burn it down, and know better than to burn it down, who are wielding power together with them.
And my point is, those two need to see each other, right?
And those of us on the outside need to understand actually that the movement is these two unreconcilable things and that means that we potentially have partners inside that movement who we can reach if they will stop signing on to this reflexive reaction.
Well, I mean, I think this is consistent with what we've been talking about since the protests began last May and June, and what Jeremy Lee Quinn, in your two conversations with him that are on this channel, talked about as well, that he learned by going to many of the protests, and I think some of the riots, and then also to the protests that turned into a riot at the Capitol on January 6th by, you know, a totally different group of people.
That really, with regard to the people on the so-called left, it's not one thing.
It's not one organization.
We saw some people who identified themselves as part of Black Lives Matter saying, what the hell is going on with the anarchists and Antifa?
And, you know, the anarchists, some of them will say, oh, we're not Antifa and vice versa, and Black Lives Matter not, and like, what is trans Black Lives Matter doing in with the rest of this?
And, you know, where did Wall of Moms come from?
And, you know, there's so many different moving parts.
I think it's actually a good way in, perhaps, to say it's not one thing, it's two, but it's not two.
It's many, many, many.
And many of the people who are just kind of fence-sitters, which is a majority of the silent people right now who think they're good liberals and therefore have to agree to this stuff, aren't sure what all they believe.
And also, the Mont and Bailey is being played all the time, and so they'll hear something about all white people are racist and go, really?
Okay, I didn't know that.
It's like, well, you know, probably not you.
Or you know, whatever it is that happens then later on, that allows them to say, well, that I know that thing sounds harsh.
But I also know I'm on board with this movement because this is about civil rights.
This is the next civil rights thing that has to happen.
The only way forward is to abolish the police or abandon all of history.
Whatever garbagey conclusion has come in on the legitimate grievances, they're being wrapped up all nice and tidy in some pretty paper and some nice bows.
And I think what you're saying basically is, This was a view behind the curtain.
This was a view of what the conversation can actually sound like at times with people who were doing so in a kind of public space.
It's not exactly public because this is invitation only and they booted a lot of the people who they didn't want.
Yes, and in fact, the night prior to this event, I was in a room with some of the same people who were playing a very different role.
And the ostensible purpose of the room the night before was to build bridges.
And it was, I don't think especially successful, but nonetheless.
Even just the ability to detect that the same people are playing a very different role and revealing a very different side of themselves in different circumstances is, you know, compelling.
I mean, you know, let's think about, you know, Naima and the difference between the way Naima came across before Evergreen started to melt down in faculty meetings.
Long-winded, but, you know, She behaved like a colleague, and then there was a point at which it was like, oh, okay, we're the enemy, I guess.
Well, I do think that somehow in modernity, many people assume that it is not just allowed but expected to have multiple personas.
And that, you know, we're supposed to dress differently when we go to work, and we have a slightly different personality, and you're supposed to make sure that whatever, you know, if you're young, you know, your social media posts from your party life don't bleed over into your professional life, right?
It's like I say, not just okay, but sort of expected that you're going to have these different modes of being.
This was always actually really from the beginning of us being professors at Evergreen.
One of the things that struck me as hypocritical among our colleagues, and it was hardly limited to the faculty at Evergreen, Was the complete change of personality and attitude towards students in particular that happened as soon as they weren't on stage?
As soon as the door closes and now it's just faculty, the mask is off.
And it was reprehensible.
It was actually deplorable.
And I think that this, you know, faculty are really encouraged to do this, to actually have disdain for students.
And you know, that's not what we're talking about here.
This isn't a faculty-student relationship.
But I think that this thing is true more widely.
And everyone, regardless of whether or not they've been a teacher or a college faculty, everyone's been a student pretty much, except for those perhaps very A few lucky of those who have been unschooled.
And everyone has had a bad teacher, I think.
Hopefully we've all had good teachers too, but I think everyone's had a bad teacher.
And many times what bad teacher is, is actually obscuring the fact that the teacher has no respect for you as a human being, sees you as a butt in a seat that has to tick some boxes so that they can give a grade or whatever at the end and then be done with you.
And many of us can detect that.
Like, we can detect it even if we're not the ones who are earning their disdain.
We can see the disdain directed at other people or at ourselves or whatever, and boy, if people knew what at least many college faculty actually say when the doors are closed, I can't imagine wanting to send my children into a situation where such people had an ability to form an opinion at all.
And so, you know, the fact that you had people one night sounding one way and the next day sounding a totally different way, and really a kind of an inhuman or at least a dehumanizing way, whether or not they were behaving in an inhuman way, they were attempting to dehumanize others.
This is appalling and I think is sort of one of the horsemen of the existential apocalypse that is happening, but I'm not surprised.
Yeah, I'm obviously not surprised either because it's not the first time I've seen it.
The point you make about professors is so deep, right?
And I don't understand how they even end up there, right?
I don't know how you stand up in front of people whom you actively disdain.
I don't know how you do it.
Right, it seems like if that's your feeling about it, then why are you there?
Yeah, get different work.
Yeah, get different work.
But nonetheless, it is a common feature.
Now, I think it's interesting, as long as we're here, you and I dealt with this boundary a little differently as professors, right?
From each other?
Yeah, from each other, perfectly consistently.
And I would say there was zero lack of authenticity about you as a professor, but there was a slight layer of increased formality, right?
You did not completely let your hair down in the role of professor, except with students that you knew very, very well.
And sometimes in the field.
Yes, definitely.
Now for me, I don't... Especially, you know, the farther away, the longer, you know, as I would say to them in advance, look, we're going to be together for, you know, 6, 8, 11 weeks.
Like, we're going to be just our human selves with one another completely.
Right, and in some ways the field forces that, whether you like it or not, right?
Well, I don't know, actually, because the vast majority of study abroad programs are crap, and the faculty don't engage with the students, and they're not actually spending time with them, and they're like meeting them for two hours a day, even at a field station, being like, okay, now we have this assignment, and now I'm going to go back and do my faculty thing, and you do your student thing.
So, yeah, it does enforce it if you're trying not to teach, which most people seem to be doing.
Yeah, I take it back.
The field, the way we did the field, forces it.
But the field does not inherently force it.
You can go back to your cabin and behave and think differently and just only interact with the students a very limited amount.
But anyway, in front of the class, I felt like, and I think this is just an idiosyncrasy of mine, right?
I think probably the way you did things where you kept a level of formality, right?
But it was not inauthentic.
So are you confusing formality with preparation?
No, no, not at all.
Okay.
Not at all.
You know, that was a little bit of a dig, but I think you can understand what I mean by that.
No, I mean, look, that was there too.
Different question.
Okay.
But, you know, just the fact that, you know, I probably shouldn't admit this, but I, you know, I think I cursed in front of the class at the same level I do at home, right?
It just wasn't distinct.
Okay, but at home I curse more than you do and in class I cursed less than you do, but I still cursed So it just probably felt like it wasn't a legitimate thing to be doing Well, yeah, I'm not sure I'm not sure what it means but I sort of you know Look, I think the thing is I was overcoming an obstacle that was unique to me one that you don't face which is that because I was such a
A lousy student is one way to say it, because I was such a bad match for school.
That is true.
And frankly, more power to you.
Yeah.
So anyway, in order to do the job of being in the role of professor, I had to do it in a way that was not inconsistent with, I didn't want to be one of those, you know, do as I say, not as I do, you know, parents effectively.
So in the role of professor, I wanted to be who I was.
And then the point is, okay, this is a different kind of, and you know, I will say, in my defense, every time I taught a new class, every time, I invested very heavily in telling people exactly what they were getting into.
I was merciless about my flaws and how they would impact people, and so the point was, look, you're signing, I'm not saying it's not worth it, but you're signing up for that, right?
Most people didn't believe you though, because, I mean, even that, it's a conversation for another time.
No, no, we're far afield.
Yes, we are far afield.
All right, so maybe we should cap this off here and just say there is something about this environment that is allowing things to be seen in this context that are difficult for people to see otherwise, and that the ability to tune into it might be worth paying more attention to than just the fact of some new social media platform showing up on the landscape.
Granted.
All right.
Excuse me.
All right, where should we go next?
There's a new paper called, let's do this next, Coronavirus Disease 2019 Hospitalizations Attributable to Cardiometabolic Conditions in the United States, colon, a Comparative Risk Assessment Analysis.
That is a mouthful, but that is the title of the new paper, O'Hearn et al., 2021.
I'm just going to read a tiny bit from it before we talk about it.
But I will say that I've ended up dissecting a number of papers on this podcast, and that is what I like to do.
Hopefully not to find tragic flaws, although a lot of the papers we've talked about here have been tragically flawed.
But in order that, we don't just take the author's word for what it is that they found.
And so you have to spend actual real time with the methods and results, and still you don't have the actual data, so you can't actually redo the analysis.
But you have to, in some cases, like one of the review papers that was finding asymptomatic transmission, and I thought I revealed, I think, That this was a total crap paper and a total crap conclusion, you could actually discern where it was that they had generated those data.
This paper, though, is really complicated, and there's a lot of layers that make it more difficult to assess it independently.
So we are basically going to stay at the level of if the author's assessment of what they found is true, this is what it means.
Deductive logic working forward from the conclusions.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Rather than the dissection and sometimes vivisection of papers that I have seen you do and participated in here on the podcast.
Which I have to say, as much as I wish that no papers were worthy of vivisection, I do find it a somewhat enjoyable task.
I do.
Well, you do it well.
Thank you.
Um, so, um, I'm not, uh, I will have you share my screen, but not yet, Zach.
So, just in the introduction, uh, they say, uh, in the most recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analysis of available national data among individuals diagnosed with COVID-19, a 35-year-old with diabetes mellitus, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, obesity, or other chronic conditions had a similar risk of COVID-19-related hospitalization.
That was a 35-year-old with one of the core morbidities.
As a 75-year-old with none of these conditions.
And a similar risk of COVID-19 related death as a 65-year-old with none of these conditions.
A dramatic biologic aging effect of poor metabolic health on risk of severity of a viral infection such as COVID-19.
So that is a pre-existing piece of research from the CDC that this paper is citing.
And then I want to... Why does my...
As soon as we plug the computer into this system for the live streams, everything goes awry.
Okay, here is, this is just the paper, it's in the Journal of the American Heart Association, O'Hearn et al just published, and I'm just going to read their set-aside box here, clinical perspective.
What is new?
Meaning, what is new in this paper?
Patients with cardiometabolic conditions, in particular obesity, hypertension, diabetes mellitus, and heart failure, have a high risk of poor outcomes from coronavirus disease 2019 infection.
That's actually not new, we already knew that.
Those are some of the major comorbidities for COVID-19 for bad outcomes and for actually getting the disease at all.
Among more than 900,000 U.S.
coronavirus disease 2019 hospitalizations through November 18, 2020, nearly two-thirds, 63.5%, were estimated to be attributable to these cardiometabolic conditions, that is, preventable if these conditions had not been present.
Top risks were obesity, which is explaining 30% of that, nearly two-thirds.
Hypertension, 26%.
Diabetes mellitus at 21%.
And then heart disease was I think about 12 or so.
And then what are the clinical implications?
Clinicians should educate their patients who may be at risk and consider promoting preventative lifestyle measures, such as improved dietary quality and physical activity, to improve overall cardiometabolic health and potentially minimize the risk for coronavirus disease 2019 severity.
At some level, again, assuming that they have done this, you know, sort of like massive data review and analysis accurately, which includes lots of places where there are models, you know, lots of places for it not to have been done brilliantly.
At some level, I feel like finally, finally, someone is doing this kind of work and talking directly about About actually what makes you as an individual more likely to have a bad outcome among those factors that you actually potentially have control over.
You know, there has been a lot of talk about age, and it's true, right?
The older you are, the more at risk you are of getting and of having a poor outcome from the disease, but you can't do anything about that.
We don't have the solution to that yet.
Sex.
Men are more likely to both get, slightly, and have bad outcomes, more so, COVID-19, than women.
And then race.
And actually, to some degree, Black people, but really, Latino, what is often described as Hispanic people.
um have um much worse outcomes compared to their um you know many more hispanics are affected than you would expect from background rates of hispanics in the population so those are those are all true things about which you can't do anything right you can't just frankly you can't just declare yourself a different age or a different sex or a different race right but these comorbidities You potentially can.
Not all of them, and not if you're really, you know, really far gone, but if you start to eat better and be more active in your life, you can reduce your obesity, and your hypertension, and potentially deal with your diabetes mellitus.
All of these are at least affected by, and in some cases, majorly affected by, lifestyle choices.
So I of course fully agree with that and there is an obvious discussion to be had about the absurdities of this moment and the idea that to discuss such things is to pretend that a particular body form is more healthy when in fact of course a particular body form is more healthy.
Now I'm fat shaming.
Right.
You could be dismissed as fat-shaming, and to the extent that the data seem to reflect that this is not fat-shaming, this is just analysis, then we can also complain that data, the very idea of data, logic, science, is white supremacist, whatever it is.
And so obviously, the right analysis is no, none of that is true, right?
And it's not to say science hasn't been put to bad ends or bent to particular populations' desires or needs or whatever.
Of course it has.
The point is those tools are actually indifferent to who you are if you use them right.
And the thing that I want to point out is that there's a whole set of analyses that one wants.
In effect, there are going to be dozens of factors involved in how likely you are to contract COVID-19 and what happens to you after you do, right?
Type O blood appears to be involved.
It seems to be somewhat protective as compared to type A.
So we talked about that in like our first or second live stream, and I haven't seen anything about that for many months now.
Have you seen anything up to date?
Yes, I did just see something recent, but I don't have it.
But that seems to be holding.
Seems to be holding.
But here's the point.
Type O blood is not going to be independent of all these other factors.
Does the fact that black people and Hispanic people are facing more COVID, does that hold if we control for vitamin D?
Probably, because the comparison between blacks and Hispanics likely involves blacks making less vitamin D as a result of just being on average darker.
Or if we control for obesity and hypertension rates.
Right.
And so that's what you really want to do is figure out how many of these things are correlated indirectly through something else, right?
Through cultural factors, right?
How many people live in a household that can have effects.
You know, it could be genetic factors, but indirect like melanin production and its interface with vitamin D production.
One of the things we talked about earlier, a paper you brought to the discussion, was the local subway lines that people were forced to take.
People were more likely to be forced to take to get to work if they lived in low-income areas in New York City.
This was a New York City-based subway analysis.
Right, which was a beautiful case of something that had nothing to do inherently with biology, but was having impacts on biology by virtue of the way the city is constructed.
The neighborhoods in the city were effectively segregated by ethnicity, and so people of certain ethnicities were at more risk of getting the thing because they happened to live in places and were taking these subway lines where they were stuck in these tiny cars with lots of people getting on and off all the time for longer.
So, anyway, one wants the analysis of variance that picks apart all of the factors, figures out which ones are actually directly correlated and which ones evaporate when you control for their connection to other things, and then you would be maximally armed.
And so in some sense, we all carry around this, you know, this stuff from the beginning, which is very probably true.
In fact, it's hard to imagine how it's false, that age is this dominant factor.
But the point is, okay, If, in effect, obesity causes you to behave like somebody who's much older, right, with respect to contracting COVID-19, then the point is, well, you don't have control over the age, but you might have control over the obesity, right?
And so, thinking in these terms, like, okay, we all probably have a few tick marks against us with respect to COVID-19, and then we have some other places where, you know, we may have the opportunity to do something, and the question is, well, how low can you get your risk?
And, you know, if you can't get your risk metabolically low, Maybe you need to correct for behaviorally, right?
So the point is armed with information.
You are in the best position to manage this, which also means stopping the focus on death, which is, of course, you know, death is very important.
But from the point of view of actually, you may get over this thing, but it may rob you of a decade of life by virtue of what it's done to your lungs or your circulatory tissue.
That's a very important factor.
And Anyway, the only right answer here is for us to figure out how to do these analyses so they're not polluted, so that our information and therefore our models, both formal and informal, get better over time, which then arms us maximally to protect ourselves and to, you know, To choose our future, you know, collectively.
Like, at what point do we, you know, say, well, this is under control enough that we have to prioritize the world moving forward, right?
That's a discussion we can only have if we have really good information on where we are and what our actual risks are.
Yes, no, that's right.
Unfortunately, all of the new variants are making that conversation even harder to have because we might have expected, in fact, I think we predicted early on that this is likely to become less virulent over time.
It's effectively, and I have seen a number of other scientists This is likely to become just a circulating background disease that effectively children get exposed to and thus have some immunity to going forward.
I don't know and I've seen no one attempt an analysis of what these different variants that are wildly different in terms of both transmissibility and death rate might do to that analysis.
Right.
Or even like how we proceed with analysis in the light of those really.
And, you know, I mean, we've got two novel factors here.
One, the ultimate wild card.
If this isn't a natural virus, if this is a modified virus, then it will not abide by our expectations evolutionarily that are based on what wild viruses do when they jump.
Now, it's also quite possible that it would be novel in its own right.
Having jumped from nature with no human tinkering, maybe this is just going to follow a different pattern and we're going to learn something about viruses we didn't know.
But if it's modified, if it is enhanced, Then one expects a very different pattern to emerge from this.
The other thing is that these vaccines are, it is increasingly clear to me that these vaccines are novel, not only with respect to the frightening interaction that they have with systems, Where we can't predict what the long-term impact is going to be because we haven't seen it yet and because... You're talking specifically about the mRNA vaccines or also about the DNA vaccines?
So just to so and we've talked a lot about vaccines on the show before but we've got Pfizer and Moderna Pfizer and Pfizer and BioNTech and Moderna vaccines those two and which are widespread in the U.S.
at this point, which are both mRNA vaccines.
Then you've got the AstraZeneca slash Oxford vaccine, which it looks like is not going to be available in the U.S., but is available a few other places, and Johnson & Johnson, which may be about to get FDA approval in the U.S.
Both of those, AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson, are DNA vaccines, also not traditional, but they use a delivery mechanism of an adenovirus rather than these lipid nanoparticles.
Yeah, and I see in, you know, various comments that we get in various places.
We're having trouble conveying the evolutionary approach here.
So, to the extent that the AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines are not a tried-and-true technology, they're somewhat more tried-and-true than the lipid nanoparticles that are used for the mRNA vaccines.
One part of them is tried-and-true, right?
One part of them is more traditional vaccine-wise, but what it also is, is something that we have evolutionary experience with that has nothing to do with vaccines.
That is to say, experience with adenoviruses, right?
So that experience with adenoviruses that our ancestors, and probably each of us has had, actually makes this safer as well.
But in any case, So when I'm talking about the novel factor of the vaccines, I'm actually talking about, so we've really got two categories.
We've got the mRNA vaccines and their lipid nanoparticles and the adenovirus vaccines.
DNA vaccines and their adenoviruses.
Just to be very careful about mRNA with lipid nanoparticles, DNA with adenoviruses.
Right, so the adenovirus vaccines are carrying their information in the form of DNA, which then gets translated into RNA, which then creates spike protein, which then alerts the immune system exactly as the mRNA vaccines do.
But there is another unique factor here, which has nothing to do with the delivery mechanism at all.
In which?
In both, in all four of these vaccines, the two different categories for vaccines.
And that is that we are very narrowly targeting the spike protein.
And by very narrowly targeting the spike protein, we are creating an evolutionary, a concentrated evolutionary force Where as cruder, more primitive vaccine technologies that take a whole virus and either break it up or neutralize its pathogenic effect, those things are much more general.
Be more precise about that, but when you say they're much more general, you're basically you're giving your body an attenuated or pieces of the original virus and your body can then develop an ability to recognize lots of different parts of that.
Whereas the four vaccines that we named, the two mRNA and the two DNA vaccines, Only provide the body with an ability to recognize the spike protein, which means that if the spike protein is to change, just to list one possible problem with this, if the spike protein is to evolve, then all of these four vaccines are rendered useless.
Not useless.
Less useful.
Less useful.
But it does two things.
I mean, this is the thing.
We're in... if this weren't so politicized, this would be incredibly fascinating.
So politicized and so dangerous.
This would be fascinating because what we're doing is experimenting with a much more targeted vaccine, right?
Narrowly targeted.
That narrowly targeted vaccine increases the likelihood of our vaccines becoming more useless over time because we're creating a very precise attack that the virus will be favored to resist.
However, it also creates the possibility of effectively swapping out the information in these vaccines without going through the rest of it.
Which is part of why, I mean I know much less about the DNA vaccine development, but the mRNA vaccine development has the potential to be so fast, and indeed apparently one of them, I don't remember which, was actually created in a weekend back in like February or March of last year.
And, you know, if they turn out to be as safe and effective as the whole world is hoping that they are, then this really does mean that future pandemics could be halted pretty quickly with, you know, widespread inoculation by a new, you know, rapidly developed mRNA vaccine.
Potentially.
Now what you really want to know is how much of the variance in the risk that comes with these things is due to the delivery mechanism and how much is due to the informational content, whether it's in mRNA or DNA.
Because if the danger is in the informational content, then you can't make the safety process more rapid, right?
You have to go through it.
On the other hand, If the danger is really in the delivery mechanism, then A, maybe we can refine that, right?
We can reduce the danger and still get the delivery.
And then B, swap out the information and you could even imagine a future not so far down the road where you might not have to have centralized creation of these things.
You could have, you know, effectively like printing newspapers in each town, right?
You could have a factory.
3D printing for vaccines.
The equivalent, right?
You could have that sort of thing taking place so that as the thing, as we got really good at tracking pathogens and epidemics, we would also get really good at delivering, you know, it could be targeted in the sense that your vaccine could be built for the particular strains that are circulating in your municipality.
So anyway, there's lots of possibilities here.
But boy, what a dangerous experiment we're discovering this stuff in.
Indeed.
Indeed.
Anything else there?
No.
All right.
We move on to sexism and science.
I thought we were going to go to the vaccination of children.
I didn't follow through on that, so I have some links, but I didn't spend any time with the research.
Can you put up the paper?
Yeah.
Well, I don't think you have it, Zach.
This isn't an original paper.
Right, this is a report.
Yeah, this is a science news article published this week.
So, in science, vaccine trials ramp up in children and adolescents.
And let's see, there's There's a quote here, if memory serves.
Here we go.
Adult deaths from COVID-19 dwarf those in children.
In the United States, for example, young people make up about 250 of 500,000 total deaths.
But for children, COVID-19 is still, quote, causing more deaths than influenza does in a typical season, says Douglas Dykema, a pediatrician and bioethicist at Seattle Children's Hospital.
Quote, those are unnecessary deaths and should be prevented.
So, I found this report a bit upsetting.
Not only, so first of all, to say it still causes more deaths than influenza in a given year, A, turns out to be questionable.
So I've got that link.
Yeah, you want to show that?
So again, I just, I did not spend any time here.
So I just, I went and looked at the CDC on influenza.
And this is, Oh boy.
So in the 2019-2020 influenza season, there were 188 reported pediatric flu deaths.
And that was a fairly high year apparently, but you scroll down and you find that Um, again, you, like, I was not ready for this.
Um, oh here we go.
While any death in a child from a vaccine-preventable illness is a tragedy, the number of pediatric flu deaths reported to CDC each season is likely an undercount.
For example, even though the reported number of deaths during the 2017-18 flu season was 188, CDC estimates, and that turns out to be the same number I think this year, CDC estimates the actual number was closer to 600.
It is likely the actual number of children who died from flu during the 2019-2020 season is higher as well.
And I would say, and this is, you know, based on no data, but that given the ways that COVID deaths have been counted, That I think if there is an error in attributing deaths to COVID in children, it's the other way.
It's an overcount.
And the CDC is telling us that they think that deaths attributable to flu in children is reliably an undercount.
And even if those things aren't true, those two numbers of deaths so far from COVID and deaths this last year from flu in children are so close that you would at least need to do a statistical analysis.
And this claim from this pediatrician and bioethicist that it's higher deaths in COVID in children from COVID than from flu is suspect at best, and the idea that we are making policy based on this.
Policy, which involves vaccinating children, is scary.
Yeah, not only making policy, but doing so in a way that has hidden hazards that aren't discussed here.
So actually, Zach, would you put up the graph that I sent you?
So this is also CDC in origin.
This is 2019, 2018, 2019.
And you can see there that the number of flu deaths in 0 to 4 is at 2.
And you can see there that the number of flu deaths in zero to four is at two.
Can you read it?
Yeah, it's 250 to 66.
So, I don't know what the children demarcation is for COVID, but certainly it's over 4.
So I don't know what the children demarcation is for COVID, but certainly it's over four.
So that's a bigger number than we were seeing.
Right.
Now go back to the report.
The Science News article?
Yeah, the Science News article.
Okay.
Now, unfortunately... Do you want Zach to show this?
Yeah, you can show it and scroll up.
Unfortunately, I can't see it there, but I believe that the numbers here... So, I saw... Was it here?
This is embarrassing, but they had a deaths In the 0 to 20 range and by saying 0 to 0 to 20 years old years old exactly I can't find it there But it creates a bias because effectively what we've got is evidence that very young children Are pretty well protected and that the numbers are very low what they're not saying here and what troubles me is
Is that Okay, first of all, it's manipulative to say any these deaths are preventable and any is too many right coming out against the death of children is you know It is a position that everybody will embrace, and many will strongly do so on an emotional basis.
No, but it at best pretends, and at worst – no, it at best doesn't understand, and at worst pretends that tradeoffs don't exist.
Right, exactly.
And so there is reason to keep children away from these vaccines that comes from the fact that they, by virtue of their age, are very well protected from catching and transmitting and Suffering bad outcomes, right?
And they've got the most of their lives to live to experience what we hope are no but might be long-term side effects of these new vaccines.
That's exactly it.
Not only do they have more of their lives ahead of them in which bad outcomes could emerge.
Imagine outcomes that are delayed 30 or 40 years, right?
If you're 50 and you get a vaccine that has a delayed bad outcome, right?
You may not live to experience it or it may not compromise much of your life.
But if you're young, Of course it will, but the other thing is developmental, right?
The question is, what is the age at which it is most reasonable to start vaccinating, right?
Now you and I, in dealing with vaccinations for our children, And we did fully vaccinate them, but we had a rubric which was to delay each of the vaccinations as long as possible so that we would get the full protection of those vaccines.
There was no point in vaccinating kids against things that they weren't going to encounter, so we vaccinated them at the point that an encounter with the pathogen was likely.
We delayed travel.
Part of the reason that I was doing study abroad alone for many years when I was just driven to do it and I wanted you to be part of it and our children to be part of it.
You really pushed back against it and said, yes, lots of people live in these places, but we're not going to put our children in the situation where we have to choose between exposing them to diseases and vaccinating them earlier than we think they should be vaccinated.
We didn't take them, for instance, to you know, the Ecuadorian Amazon until we felt that they were old enough to get the full, you know, yellow fever and all the rest of the vaccinations that they really, we felt they needed to have in order to be safe there.
Right.
So, okay, we're going to vaccinate kids who are better protected, are more, are going to have, likely to have greater impacts, both because of the amount of time and because of the early stage in their development at which they're encountering these vaccines, which open up possibilities for bad outcomes that adults won't have. which open up possibilities for bad outcomes that adults won't
And at the same time in that article, it describes the fact that because we have pretty good data from the safety trials that have already been done, these trials are being scaled back in terms of the number Right, so basically this is being treated as pro-formal, which is exactly the opposite of a responsible approach to this.
The responsible approach would say, kids have less to gain and more to lose, we should be very sure about the safety, and then we should figure out what the age is, rather than clumping people 0-20, right?
Which is crazy, because you know, kids 18-19 do have some substantial risk.
So, anyway, the elephant in the room, of course, is the perverse incentives surrounding the profitability of vaccinating everybody.
And so, I increasingly think we have to worry about what role that is playing.
It does not make sense to me, maybe somebody will explain to us why we don't get it, but it doesn't make sense to me that all of the people who definitely had COVID, and I understand there's a problem with people who may have had COVID, but people who definitely had COVID,
They've had the equivalent of a vaccine, and it's not obvious that this couldn't compromise immunity in ways that we discussed last time, or at the very least be needless and expose them to risks that we can't say much about because they could be very well delayed and we haven't seen the outcomes here.
At the level of a desire to vaccinate everyone, as if vaccination is inherently good and the more people we can get it to the better, that does not pay proper heed to the fact that the cost-benefit analysis is very different depending upon who you are.
And that means we should be hedging out those risks for several different groups of people.
Exactly, and yeah, the three populations that I've mentioned multiple times, you've already mentioned two of them.
It's children, it's people who've already had COVID, and it's pregnant women.
Yep, absolutely.
All right, now can we talk about sexism?
Yes!
Awesome.
All right.
Okay, so I just ran across this remarkably sexist obituary of a female chemist.
Actually, the right response is you.
No, go ahead.
I just don't want you giving something away here because of the way I'm introducing this.
I'm not.
I was going to give you permission to talk about sexism.
Oh, thank you, sir.
Thank you.
You're welcome.
Okay, so this really sexist obituary of a female chemist came to my attention this week, and before I read just a bit of it to share just, you know, how obnoxious it is, let me say a few things about what her contributions were because they don't show up in this obit at all.
She made contributions in electric arc lighting and sediment transport.
She won the Royal Society's illustrious Hadley Medal, and she held 26 patents.
So this is no slouch in science land.
But this excerpt, written by one Henry E. Armstrong, this obituary includes the following two paragraphs.
Mrs. Ayrton was one of those who aspired to prove that woman can be as man as an original scientific inquirer.
Did she succeed?
If we are to frame a psychology of the scientific mind regarding this as a species apart, we must carefully note and analyze the doings of such as she.
I have but small qualification for the office, yet as she was my colleague's wife, and we often met and were in fair sympathy, I was able to take notice of her idiosyncrasies and of the conditions under which she was placed.
And another paragraph, a few paragraphs later, my God, speaking as he does, as this obituary writer does throughout the entire thing, really speaking of the husband, who was also a scientist, and she's just like the hanger on.
So this is the obituary writer, and the him here is the husband, not the person the obituary is about.
I often told him that he and his wife were an ill-assorted couple, being both enthusiastic and having cognate interests.
They constantly worried each other about the work they were doing.
He should have had a humdrum wife, an active, useful sort of person, such as Lady Catherine recommended Mr. Collins to marry, who would have put him into carpet slippers when he came home, fed him well, and led him not to worry either himself or other people, especially other people.
Then he would have lived a longer and a happier life and done far more effective work, I believe.
My god, right?
Like, just incredible, right?
So wait, the problem is that because she was scientifically productive, she could not properly tend to him, which made him less productive?
Yes, the obituary author believes that the man, who I don't even know if he's dead or not, like, would have been an even more impressive scientist if he had simply had a humdrum wife, an active, useful sort of person.
Yes, so this in the obituary of the woman, right?
Okay, so there's been a call to retract this sexist obituary, right?
Here's an excerpt from the call to retract.
And as I said, I didn't read the whole obituary, but it didn't include any of the, you know, and that's just a few of her remarkable achievements.
The call to retract includes, it's brazen sexism serves only as a monument to how long and hard women have had to fight for an equal place at the scientific table.
And it's anti-Semitic.
This mean anti-eulogy is by someone who knew little of Ayrton or her work.
The chemist Henry Armstrong airs doubts about whether women could be scientists and casts dispersions on Ayrton's originality and intelligence.
By striking contrast, other obituaries, such as that in The Guardian, celebrate her remarkable scientific achievement.
After a letter of complaint, Armstrong, with breathtaking arrogance, chided his critic for lacking a sense of humor and requested one correction to a typographical error.
So, these are some good points, right?
This is a terrible, really terrible obituary, and it's sexist, it's awful, it frames the scientist's career entirely in terms of what her husband was and how if she had been less interesting, her husband could have been more so maybe.
But, you know, in general calls to retract are antithetical to science journals.
On the other hand, an obituary isn't a science paper.
But there is one other salient point in this story that I think is worth pointing out, which is that the call to retraction was published last week in 2021, and the obituary was published in 1923.
98 years ago.
So, truly stunning, really, that we have a call to attraction for a 98-year-old obituary, which, if it happened, it disappears history.
Like, it's actually important to know that accomplished scientists from 98 years ago were being written about in this way.
We need to know these things.
Well, I'm actually for the retraction if it would bring her back.
I was unable to find any information on whether that would be the consequence.
But wouldn't we need to bring her husband back, too?
He probably is dead by now, and given that she was best with him, we would need him back as well.
All right.
I hadn't thought about that dimension.
I admit it's a wrinkle.
Always forgetting the husband.
Yes, always forgetting the husband.
Look, my sense, exactly as your sense, is that it is absolutely essential that we not retract this, right?
A hundred percent, yes.
I mean, precisely because it teaches exactly the right lesson.
It's just so obvious!
It's adorable, right?
Yes.
Chemist Henry Armstrong proves how adorable he is.
Well, but I mean, how provincial and absurd and how, you know, how different a world we live in.
You remember the elders in the museum where we learned our craft, right?
Spoke of many things.
One of them was a generation prior, the concern that women couldn't do field biology because where would they pee, right?
I don't actually remember this.
You don't remember this?
No.
Well, that was a story that Dick liked to tell, right?
Dick Alexander.
Dick Alexander, my PhD advisor, who mentored many, many women.
He wasn't ever fooled by this kind of nonsense.
Right.
Dude was not sexist in any way.
Right.
How important is it for modern women in science to be able to go back and say, oh, well, on the one hand, 1923 is a while ago.
And on the other hand, it's not that long.
And look how far we've moved, right?
That is significant.
And so it just goes to the whole instinct to tear down the monuments to some era to pretend that it didn't happen somehow.
As if it's not going to make the problem worse.
Worse.
Like, bring back sexism.
And you know, it actually is akin, this like, ahistoricity, which also I think obscures a little bit of an innumeracy, in which that thing that happened in the past is now imagined to be what is happening right now.
And you know, the person who's advocating for the retraction doesn't pretend that this didn't happen 98 years ago, but she still says we should retract it.
And in fact, I don't have the whole thing right here, but It reminded me a little bit of, again to go full circle here, the claims when Evergreen was blowing up that what was happening on this college campus, the most progressive college campus in the US maybe, in which literally no founded claims of racism ever came to the fore, We were being compared to Alabama in the 1950s?
Like literally that was the claim on stage by various people before the blow-up and during the blow-up.
By Felix.
This is insane.
Yes, by staff at the college who were supposed to be bringing us together and creating an educational environment, and of course he was doing exactly the opposite on both fronts.
I am grateful to the person who was called to retract this obituary because I got to go back and read this obituary and thought, wow!
I didn't know that a woman who died in 1923 would have been doing all of that work, right?
We all have Marie Curie as the example of a female scientist from early And actually, you know, like the Great Woman of Mathematics account on Twitter also celebrates some of the older, the historic figures from mathematics.
But to have had this person be so actually accomplished and then so denigrated in death is really useful to know.
I'm glad I know that even though I find this modern letter to nature absurd and indicative of exactly the problem that we've been talking about.
There's a kind of defect of thinking that I'm sure it isn't local to the left always, but I'm seeing it in a very concentrated form on especially the extreme left, the woke left, which has to do with a sense of
Because we look back at history and we recognize certain things as clearly absurd and wrong, there is a desire, which I think is totally legitimate, to be on the right side of history.
And I'm one of these people who disagrees.
People are always complaining about those who say, be on the right side of history, or this is the right side of history, or whatever the claim is.
The problem is you never actually know for sure, but the idea that that's where you're supposed to be, right?
You're supposed to understand how history will judge, you know, this or that, and being on the right side of history is a laudable goal.
But because of that,
There is this manipulable nature to people who understand that to be the objective where the point is you can paint this as that and then the person will jump because the point is well the last thing they want to be is discovered to be on the wrong side of history and so I see this unfolding in and around the issue of trans where I tweeted this week that you didn't actually need
To surrender the sexual binary, which we've pointed out so many times, goes back 500 million years in our lineage, nor do you need to... At least.
At least.
Nor do you need to invent any new pronouns or force people to say they, them.
The fact is, you can fully honor and protect trans people by just allowing them to choose whether they want he, he or she, right?
And so, in any case, the point is, That the desire to portray these modifications of language as the right side of history, right?
And then we can look back at, you know, what happened with homosexuality, right?
And so people then immediately jump to, I'll do whatever it is so that I'm not, you know, I'm not the villain in this case, causes them to embrace things which actually don't naturally follow.
Right?
And my point about the pronouns, for example, would be that, look, I'm perfectly persuaded that there are trans people and that the right thing to do is to honor whatever their choice of pronouns is among the two normal choices.
It becomes, though, an exercise of power at the point that you say, ah, you're going to call me Zer, right?
No, it does.
And sorry, go on.
Well, anyway, my only point is that the ability of people to be manipulated on the basis of a strong desire not to be caught out by history is tied up in the same thing where instead of leaving this absurd obituary as a monument or leaving the statue of A great president who is compromised by his having held slaves, right?
Leaving that to, you know, spark the proper curiosity of people in the future.
Maybe they're teaching moments, right?
Remember how education was, you know, and when I first heard this phrase, I thought, oh my goodness, that's ridiculous.
You know, like, you use the surprising, the offensive, the unusual as a teaching moment.
Now let's figure out what it means.
Let's go forward from here.
Right.
And, you know, the contradiction, right?
George Washington could have been king.
He refused it, out of moral decency, and yet he held slaves.
So the point is, alright, that sounds like a human story, and it sounds like one that one doesn't want to shortchange by turning it into a cartoon, and, you know, by pretending, well, of course he's so compromised by his flaws that we can no longer even pay attention to his accomplishments, you know, or his decency, that, you know, it builds a totally phony history.
Yeah.
So just to get back to pronouns for a moment, as you know, one of the essays that I'm sort of working on in the background has to do a lot with pronouns and what kind of a power play it is.
But, you know, the thing that's absent from your just thumbnail analysis there is the moving target.
And, you know, we're no longer even just talking about trans.
We're now talking about non-binary.
And, you know, non-binary has no place in this discussion at all.
It's just it's a total fabrication, right?
And, you know, you present how you want, but, you know, the pronouns refer to your sex, and if you, you know, really feel that you need to be referred to as the sex that you were not born to, then
All of us who are interested in respecting you are going to do that, but the creation of new pronouns is a perfect match for the invocation of 93,000 genders and all of this other ridiculousness that just departs entirely from reality.
It's just not pretending anymore, really.
And some people, I'm sure, are actually enjoying watching the good-hearted, trying-to-play-ball-and-get-on-board-the-next-several-rights-thing liberals, like us, but the confused, go like, okay, I guess I'll call you that thing.
I guess I'm not sure what that is for anyway.
Why can we not agree universally on some of the things that until yesterday, to use Douglas Murray's formulation, everyone knew?
Right, okay.
You have caused me to formulate exactly what I'm seeing that's troubling me, which is the recognition that there is something that must be done, and the false connection with past examples causes people to trip over themselves, to try to get out in front of the race to be decent to some oppressed group.
And the problem is, That the desire, hey, whatever it is that needs to be done to honor trans people, I want to be in front of it, right?
I want to be in the lead.
That desire to be in the lead is what causes people to say, oh, I know what we can do, right?
And it allows bad actors to tack on these things that amount to power, and that is where the whole thing falls apart.
And so, you know, Yeah, why does the discussion about trans require us to pretend anything at all about the sexual binary, right?
It's trans, it actually is built from the sexual binary, right?
It depends on it.
It depends on it.
If trans is real, then the sexual binary is real.
Then the sexual binary is real.
And interestingly, my tweet garnered at least three responses I know of from people who are famously trans who agreed.
Sure.
Yep.
All right.
Good segue to Octopus?
Of course.
Okay.
This is just brief, but here we have a Science News article, and I can link to the full article too, but it's pretty dense.
No, actually this is editor's choice, so each week the editors at Science go and look at papers that are published elsewhere.
And talk about what they think the readers of science might be interested in.
And so this tiny little blurb says, among other things, Katz et al., the authors of the original research published in the Journal of Experimental Biology, found that octopus arms display a phototactic response to light, automatically withdrawing when the arm, especially the tip, is illuminated.
So this is akin to mammals, or if you're not familiar with other mammals, the human response when you reach towards a hot stove and retract it.
This is actually a spinal cord reflex.
This isn't even going through the brain, I think, that reflex.
Obviously, cephalopods aren't vertebrates.
They don't have a central nervous system that's evolved in the same way ours is, but this phototaxis Yeah, it's fascinating.
without connection to the brain is incredible to me.
- Yeah, it's-- - Just incredible. - It's fascinating.
Now I did go back to the original paper and it said something that caught me totally off guard, which I couldn't track down the reasoning, but it basically assumed that octopi have poor proprioception, which actually-- - Yes, it does, doesn't it?
Yeah.
I don't know why it would assume that, but nonetheless, this was… Yeah, no, it's built into the assumption.
Yeah, I've got the paper here.
I don't… It does assume that.
They also only started out with four octopi, and then one died during the experiment, so they ended up with three.
So it's a tiny sample size, as you would really hope for with a lab experiment on such intelligent creatures that they're not using hundreds of animals.
I don't know if you saw in the footnotes that two of them actually escaped, and they caught up to them at a bar across town.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But anyway, yeah, this is really interesting and I think it actually it's weird.
Eric and I were having a conversation about Octopi yesterday.
Yes, you mentioned his insistence on a non-standard plural.
Oh, yes, I did mention that, didn't I?
In any case, there is a question about why octopi are so unusual and have so many features that we regard as emblematic of intelligence and maybe consciousness without being social, a topic I would like to return to later.
I think there's a lot to be said on this topic, and this little bit may begin to tell us something about it.
Well, the paper did say that they believed that the animal had the ability to override the response, unlike the touching of a hot stove.
Yeah.
Which it would almost have to be, given what octopi are capable of doing with respect to moving their limbs, and obviously they do go out in the light, and so if that was like touching a hot stove, they wouldn't do it.
Yeah.
Yeah, sir, I was looking at this abstract.
It's a strange paper, but an interesting result.
Yeah, definitely.
I think that's it.
All right, we've arrived.
We've arrived.
We have some announcements, and then we're done for the week.
All right, for February, we're going to take a 15 minute break.
In about 15 minutes, answering questions from the super chat that you posed this hour and the ones that you pose next hour.
Once again, the Dark Horse membership private Q&A is happening tomorrow at 11am Pacific for two hours.
The questions have already been asked for that, but if you join at my Patreon, you will, at the $5 up level, you will have access to that and we leave it up as well.
So even if you can't join live, You will be able to see it, although the numbers are small enough that we actually view the chat while we're doing it and are able to interact some, and it's fun.
It is fun.
We're enjoying it a lot, yeah.
You can also join Brett at his Patreon, where you're going to be having cool conversations next weekend.
Actually, the first one next Saturday will be before our next livestream.
That's true.
It's going to be 9 o'clock Pacific.
That way that'll give me a little breathing room afterwards so I will make sure to... You've just got to switch that on your Patreon.
I've got to switch that on the announcement.
Yep.
We need to get out some new merchandise.
And a while ago you indicated that we might be interested in hiring an artist and applications poured in to our moderator at darkhorse.moderator at gmail.com.
And we have now and so our moderator basically put together PowerPoints for us and so we couldn't see anything about who or where or what or cost or anything and just showed us all of this art and we have now selected some finalists and that's not to say that there weren't amazing artists among so many amazing ones and also many different types of
of art such that for different types of projects we might reach out to some of the people who contacted us who haven't yet been, but all the finalists have been contacted at this point.
And you can also, so you don't need to send more art to darkhorse.moderator at gmail.com, but if you have questions, you know, I've actually begun seeing questions to me directly.
Oh, I heard you had a P.O.
box, where can I send a letter?
So you can get that information from darkhorse.moderator at gmail.com.
Maybe that's it.
All right.
We will see you in 15 minutes.
And for those of you listening on audio, we'll catch you next week.
And in the next 15 minutes, we encourage you to eat good food and go outside.
Go outside.
Also, what we didn't mention is the Tristan Harris Dark Horse podcast is up.
