#84: Hey YouTube: Divide by Zero (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 84th 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—now for the first time live on Odysee! In this episode, we discuss chapter 1 of our forthcoming book, A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century, and read an excerpt on culture and consciousness, and the need for generalists in a hyper-specialized world. Bret then introduces a new term: Asch-troturfing, to help expla...
I love the smell of new platform in the early afternoon.
It smells like blockchain.
All right, enough of that madness.
We are here.
So, hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast, broadcasting today on the fabulous Odyssey platform, which is in fact powered with blockchain.
Indeed.
It is, we think, likely to be a successor to YouTube.
That is what replaces YouTube's censorious nature.
Yes, it is looking like YouTube is not going to learn the lessons of history, and it will therefore ultimately be defeated by those of us who know that free expression is of the utmost importance, especially in complex, dangerous times like these.
So anyway, YouTube, you ought to wise up, because Odyssey is showing you how it's done.
Yep.
So it's open source, decentralized, built on the library blockchain, and anything else we want to say about it?
Yeah, I will say something, that we have been playing around with it a little bit in order to get this stream up and running, and one of the things that we have discovered is that the platform is actually way more advanced than YouTube in many ways.
It is a better interface that is more functional.
There are a couple places where YouTube has a feature here or there, but overall it's looking great.
So, well done, Odyssey.
So if you're watching this, you're presumably watching it on Odyssey, but if you're listening, we get more listener downloads on the podcast than we do even views in the past on YouTube.
But if you want to come check out videos at any point, it's Odyssey O-D-Y-S-E-E.
O-D-Y-S-E-E.
And I will say that Odyssey has a few little requirements of us in order to be compliant with their platform.
Some of those requirements are technical and I won't bother you with them.
They also have some metaphorical requirements.
Hence, our Sword of Damocles that is hanging over the head of the Dark Horse, which is Symbolic of YouTube's egregious, censorious behavior.
Yes, they have the Sword of Damocles hanging over Dark Horse.
They have hit us with strikes on both of our channels, and they are threatening our livelihood.
But we will not be deterred.
And why won't we be deterred?
Because it is very important that you all have reasonable people who attempt to sort out Difficult matters to show their work and that is why this podcast has the audience It does I'm quite sure so whatever they do.
We will be here one way or the other Speaking of not being deterred, because we're not on YouTube right now and our super chat replacement isn't up yet and we don't have a way to encourage you to help us by providing monetary donations with questions, we are going to invite people to ask questions on Twitter this time.
Anyone who asks a question using the hashtag UNDETERRED, that's going to get compiled.
By one of our behind-the-scenes awesome guys and sent as a spreadsheet to us in the 15 minutes between this, our main podcast, and our Q&A afterwards.
And then we will, as usual, not get to all of the questions, but we will get to as many as we can.
So again, hashtag undeterred in Twitter for any question and that will get collected after this live stream.
Excellent.
And I will say I have one other announcement.
This is a weird one.
This is an announcement for one person, okay?
I have an emergency need for a haircut because big stuff is gonna come at you on Tuesday.
So if there is anything that the person who is charged with the unfortunate task of dealing with my hair can do to find time, Such that on Tuesday, my hair was a neater phenomenon than it is now.
That would be so appreciated.
So anyway, I don't know if she's watching.
Have you considered reaching out to her directly?
I have.
It's not as easy as you might think.
She deals with problem hair, so she's kind of in demand.
I see.
She's a problem hair specialist?
I didn't realize this about her.
Okay, so we're going to do announcements, we're going to talk a little bit about where we're going, and then we are going to pay the rent in one of the ways that we are paying the rent.
We have two paid ads today before we launch into the rest of the show, but additional announcements are that live on my Patreon right now, so another way that we're paying the rent, we're trying to diversify.
We have open for a 48-hour period for people patronizing?
That's not to sound right.
At the $11 up level, the opportunity to ask a question that we will then prioritize answering in our private Q&A that we do once a month on the last Sunday of the month at 11 a.m.
Pacific.
And we don't know yet what platform that will be on.
Maybe that also will be streamed here on Odyssey, probably.
And, you know, those private Q&As are a lot of fun.
The chat is small enough that we can actually look at the chat.
You know, we never see the chat for these bigger live streams, but we can see them interact.
So, what else announcements-wise?
You are deep in trying to get things done.
Okay.
Well, it's possible that we will reverse the order of the ads and you will have time to find it while I do mine.
Alright.
What are we going to talk about today?
We are going to, as promised two weeks ago, since it's been two weeks since we came to you last due to us taking our boys in opposite directions, One Saturday ago.
We are going to continue with what we began two weeks ago and talk a little bit about the first chapter of our forthcoming book, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, and read a tiny little excerpt from that and share a little bit about what that first chapter is about.
Just a little bit.
Every single chapter is far more than can be really explained in a little segment on the show.
We're going to talk a little bit about, I don't even know if you said, this is livestream episode number 84.
This is Dark Horse 84, and in honor of Dark Horse 84, we are going to talk a little bit, as we have on two previous episodes, about George Orwell's prescient, unfortunately, novel by the same name, 1984.
We are going to talk really a lot about what it is that we are experiencing sort of society-wide and us in particular with regard to censorship.
So there are a lot of ways into that.
It is June 19th, livestream 84.
That connection is really likely to be meaningless, but yet it points in the direction of the analysis that we are going to embark on.
I don't… Does June 19th mean something besides… 1984.
It's 19.
It's 84.
You know, in the same way that you find the primeness of certain streams to be at least mathematically important, I find this connection to be somewhat important.
June 1984.
I see.
Okay.
Yeah.
Okay.
All right.
I think we're done with that.
I've gotten it out of my system, so, you know, that's progress.
Yeah.
Did you find what you were looking for?
I did.
It's not on the right device, but, you know, we're going to make it work.
Nobody will even know.
Okay, so we are now going to pay the rent.
Zach, if you want to green us up.
All right, I guess I'm up first and I'm going to talk about Allform Sofas.
And we were approached by Allform Sofas who wanted to sponsor the podcast.
And they offered, since we are not going to endorse anything that we haven't tried ourselves and that we don't find excellent, they sent us a sofa.
And I must say, I was really interested to see what was going to happen here.
Because what Allform is, is an amazing company that allows you to basically configure a sofa.
You configure the sofa online.
So you figure out how your room works, which side you want to chaise on, however you want to do it.
You decide what the form is, you decide whether you want fabric or leather and all of these things.
And anyway, these are really high quality sofas.
But how exactly was this going to work?
Lo and behold, I was shocked to discover they FedExed it to us.
It arrived in boxes, and Toby and I spent an evening putting it together, and there's basically, they've come up with this really cool system, right, where, you know, you build the pieces one by one, and you attach them together, and, you know, you would think that that would make for a very compromised sofa, but in this case, it does not.
It actually makes for a marvelous sofa, and I will say that is said as somebody who has built some furniture.
Actually, I have built a coffee table that we have downstairs, so I'm a bit picky about these things.
I wasn't totally convinced until I saw it, but it's really quite amazing and very, very comfortable.
Well, and the proof is in the sitting as well.
It's all very well and good to have an attractive sofa, but is it comfortable?
It's fabulously comfortable.
Yeah, it's a lovely sofa.
So, anyway, you should try this out.
It's a great system.
They will give you a 20% discount if you use the code Dark Horse.
You will find them at allform.com slash Dark Horse.
20% off if you use Dark Horse as the coupon code.
That's all form A-L-L-F-O-R-M.
Right, and you can configure yourself there and undoubtedly you're gonna love it.
All right, so I am going to talk about Public Goods, which we have talked about before.
We're going to continue to do so because they're actually really a great company.
They aim to be your everything store, your one-stop shop for high quality everyday essentials.
These essentials are made from carefully sourced ingredients and available at an affordable price.
Public Goods has razors and toilet paper and shampoo, towels and glassware and sponges, coffee and mustard and coconut oil.
The whole gamut.
And they've got quirkier niche items, too, like bone broth concentrate and gluten-free pasta and small batch marshmallows.
We haven't tried any of those last things, but if you're into that sort of thing, they look good.
Public Goods cares about health and sustainability for its customers and for the planet.
The ingredients are ethically sourced, the products are free of many of the unhealthy ingredients and harmful additives that are so common in many products these days, and they plant one tree for every order placed.
Public Goods products have great design, too.
The aesthetic is simple and clean, and there are no garish colors.
I personally don't like having products that draw attention to themselves in my home or cabinets, and that's one reason that I like these guys' products a lot.
And you don't have to sign up for regularly scheduled deliveries, but their subscription service is actually efficient and simple and easy to use, and I recommend that as well.
Public Goods members can buy all of their premium essentials in one place, making Public Goods their new everything store.
So for Dark Horse listeners, We have the following offer.
Receive $15 off your first Public Goods order with no minimum purchase.
They are so confident that you will absolutely love their products and come back again and again that they are giving you $15 to spend on your first purchase.
You have nothing to lose.
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That is P-U-B-L-I-C-G-O-O-D-S dot com forward slash dark horse to receive $15 off your first order.
All right.
All right.
We have arrived.
The main event.
The main event.
We're going to start by talking about our book a little bit, okay?
So, Zach, if you want to just pull up the website.
We showed you the book website last time, and is that... yes, awesome.
So you can go there to read a little bit more about his synopsis and the chapter titles and all, but we are just going to go through week by week and talk a little bit about each of the chapters in turn.
So two weeks ago it was the introduction, today is chapter one which is called The Human Niche and I'm going to read just two pages from a section called Culture vs. Consciousness.
And this is a topic to which we have discussed here and which we discussed in a talk that we gave virtually at Princeton a year ago, 13 months ago or so, and which we expand on quite a lot in the penultimate chapter of the book.
So we'll be coming back to these topics in, I guess, 11 weeks.
So culture versus consciousness.
Consciousness is valuable for problem solving, but it isn't so good for execution.
The gymnast, the virtuoso, and the warrior all succeed by taking what they have discovered consciously and learning to apply it without explicit deliberation.
Transformative insights and ideas move out of the conscious layer and into the parts of us that know how to get things done.
When one is in the zone, the conscious mind is present, but it's a spectator who steers clear so as not to disrupt the flow.
Behaviors become habitual and intuitive.
In an individual, we might call this skill or craft.
In a family or a tribe, such habits become traditions, passed efficiently from one generation to the next.
Scale this up further, and we have culture.
Homo sapiens therefore oscillate between two dominant modes.
When we face problems for which our prior understanding is inadequate, we become conscious.
How do we feed ourselves in this new land?
We plug our minds into a shared problem-solving space and share what we know.
Then we parallel process, proposing hypotheses, providing observations, offering challenges, until we arrive at a new answer, one that an individual would rarely reach alone.
If the result works well when tested in the world, it gets refined and then driven into a more automatic, less deliberative layer.
This is culture.
The application of culture to the circumstances for which it is adapted is the population-level equivalent of an individual being in the zone.
This model implies a few important things.
When times are good, people should be reluctant to challenge ancestral wisdom, their culture.
In other words, they should be comparatively conservative.
When things aren't going well, people should be prone to endure the risks that come with change.
They should be comparatively progressive, liberal, if you will.
This, of course, has a lot to say about the modern world, because for various reasons there is little agreement at present on how well things are going.
Moments before the Titanic hit the iceberg, the ship was a marvelous testament to human achievement.
Moments after, it was a monument to the hazard of hubris.
Too often, it is only in retrospect that the rearrangement of deck chairs appears absurd.
More often than not, there is no iceberg, no clear demarcation of before and after, of the moment when consciousness should become more salient than culture.
The financial collapse of 2008, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster are all symptoms of a civilization-level disorder, one that has no name.
Let's call it the sucker's folly.
The tendency of concentrated short-term benefit not only to obscure risk at long-term cost, but also to drive acceptance even when the net analysis is negative.
These events are evidence that we are resting on our cultural laurels and speeding toward disaster, lulled into a false sense of security and away from collective consciousness by the opulence of our surroundings.
The sooner we recognize this, the greater the chance to divert the ship to a safe course, a puzzle we will return to in the last chapter of this book.
The answer to our earlier question, then, what is the human niche, is this.
Humans don't have a niche.
Not in the standard sense of the term.
We have escaped the paradigm by mastering a different game.
We have discovered how to swap out our software and replace it as the need arises by oscillating between culture and consciousness.
The human niche is niche switching.
Humanity is the master of every trade.
If we were machines, we would be ones that are compatible with many software packages.
The Inuit hunter knows the Arctic, but has few of the skills needed to function on the Kalahari or the Amazon.
Humans can be good at almost anything, given the proper tools and software, and human populations can be good at many things by virtue of a division of labor.
But each individual person will either have to limit themselves or accept the costs that come with being a generalist.
As our world becomes increasingly complex, though, the need for generalists grows.
We need people who know things across domains and who can make connections between them.
Not just biologists and physicists, but biophysicists.
People who have switched gears and found that the tools they brought from their prior vocations serve them well in a new one.
We must find ways to encourage the development of generalists.
In this book, we argue that a key way to do this is to encourage a careful, nuanced understanding of what evolution is, what it has made us, and how we can resist its goals.
I am so excited to have this finally in the world.
It's going to be very useful and I should just point out that the book itself and this podcast are exercises in campfire.
Hence my reference to it in the tweet that pointed.
My followers here and it is something that is it is very live for us.
We participate in campfire to exchange ideas consciously and figure out what we should think about things that none of us have seen before.
I would also point out not on that list of disasters in there is COVID-19.
And now that Jon Stewart has finally cracked the case, we can recognize that this is yet one more likely testament to that same dynamic.
So Well, and as you wrote about in your most recent Unheard piece as well, right?
So we will, if I remember to, we'll link that as well in the video description.
Yeah, maybe that's it except that one of the other things I want to do whenever we talk about the book is just read a little bit from the index because this index tickles me deeply.
When we received it just whenever it was, three weeks ago or so, We were laughing, pleased at it because it really reveals how diverse a list of things we talk about in the book is.
So starting in the middle of A, middle of A, this is only a third of what is in A in the index.
We have allocation trade-offs, altriciality, American Dream, amniotes, amphibians, anisogamy, sapphire mining in Ankarana, anti-anxiety medications, antibiotics, antidepressants, anti-fragility,
Ants, Apes, Appendix, Arctic Terns, Aristotle, Art, Solomon Asch, who will come up again in this episode, Asexual Reproduction, Astrology, Atlantic Spotted Dolphins, Rachel Aviv, and obviously, Ayahuasca.
So, in my opinion, when you read from the index, it should be a little more crazed, a little more wild-eyed.
Do you want to do it?
No, I don't, actually.
Yes, this is actually one of my terrors from childhood, was being forced to read out loud.
Yes, it's never been a strong suit for me.
And yet you're happy to advise me that I need to be a bit more crazed.
Anti-fragility!
Ants!
Apes!
Exactly.
So I have a question for you.
I mean, as long as the index of the book has become a subject of the podcast, I have to know.
Oh boy, okay.
Let's suppose there was more than one book, and therefore more than one index.
Indexes or indices?
I feel it's indices.
Yeah, I do too, and I think maybe we're wrong.
And I don't remember why, if so.
Wrong, you say?
That somehow doesn't feel right.
I honestly don't remember.
This is something that grammarians, of course, have an opinion on.
And, you know, insofar as there's no pressing need to change how it is that we're supposed to do it, simply messing with all of the things that we've always done at the same time is obviously another recipe for disaster.
So why not leave those things that do function, even if it's not what you thought they were, alone already?
But I honestly actually don't know which it is in this case.
Yes.
So the question is left hanging in the air.
I don't know.
That's another weird one.
You know, hanged versus hung.
Yeah, it is.
It is.
Alright, well this has been fun.
Where are we headed?
Well, we could go a number of places here.
I have a couple of excerpts from 1984 to share at some point.
We could go right to the thing that potentially is relevant to Solomon Ash.
Yeah, yeah.
You want to go there?
Yeah, I do.
I do.
So, I was mulling over the situation with censorship.
I've actually been mulling it over for a number of weeks.
I talked about it with one of my Patreon discussions.
We had a very interesting discussion about what it is and how it works.
Anyway, I arrived at what, for me, I think is a new thought.
Maybe it's a revisit to an old thought, but it certainly felt new and I thought it was important enough that it was worth sharing.
And the thought has to do with what is going on relative to the things that everybody seems to know that are not spoken of, right?
So, you know, the lab leak is a great example of this because throughout the lab leak there were large numbers of people who were aware that there was something very far off about the story that this couldn't possibly have come from the lab.
And, you know, Jon Stewart did a hilarious job of satirizing that on Stephen Colbert's show.
Recently, but the point is, many people said privately what they were not saying publicly, they self censored.
And we see the very same thing with respect to question of repurposed drugs at the moment and the question of harms from the current crop of COVID vaccines.
There are lots of people discussing these things behind the scenes, and they are not of one mind.
But there is a general sense that there is a public conversation, and that the very same people who restrain themselves in public when they are talking privately, when there's no microphone or camera or anybody taking down what they're saying, are a lot more broad-minded about these topics.
And it raises a question.
If so many people are aware of the deep story, what is the point of censoring it?
Right?
What I realized was that the point of censoring it may actually have to do with a particular trick of the mind that is known and has been known for quite some time that is being used to game us.
And so this brings us to the Ash experiment done by Solomon Ash in the late 60s.
I should have looked.
I think 50s.
Well, we will find out in a second here.
In any case, the experiment... Zach, you want to put up the graphic I pointed you to?
Well, I'm going to describe it while Zach is looking for it.
In the ASH experiment, a group of individuals are seated at a table looking at a chalkboard.
51, early 50s.
51, it's earlier than I thought.
Okay, so the This group is composed of one test subject and a bunch of confederates, but of course the test subject believes he is one of a number of test subjects.
And they are faced with simple objective questions, the most famous of these being a series of lines of different length that are on the board.
And the lengths are sufficiently different that the answers to the questions that they are asked are unambiguous.
So there are lines of different lengths and they are asked in sequence is line A longer, shorter, or the same as line B for example.
And when the sequence involves the confederates of the experiment saying something that is clearly false, so that one after the other says the incorrect thing, the subject of the experiment is very likely to report that they see the same thing that has been said by the people the subject of the experiment is very likely to report that they see So this is known as the Ash Conformity Phenomenon.
It's very unlikely.
I didn't know you were going to walk through this.
I have not reminded myself of the precise numbers, and it's actually in the book.
But very few people conformed all the time to wrong answers, but a majority of people conformed sometimes to patently wrong answers on simple factual questions.
Right.
And so the thought in the context of this modern, very bizarre spasm of censorship, where things that are perfectly obvious, like there's something conspicuous about a, you know, a respiratory coronavirus, a novel respiratory coronavirus breaking out on the doorstep of One of the world's two premier laboratories studying and enhancing such viruses, you know.
It is the, what did he say, an explosion of chocolatey goodness near Hershey, Pennsylvania.
Yeah, now that was the comedy routine to bring parsimony to the fore.
Just think it through, guys.
How simple an explanation.
But the point is, lots of people had done the calculation ahead of time, and what they didn't do was say that they had their doubts.
So, here's the point.
If you inflict stigma and other kinds of pain and cost on those who say certain things, People calculating their own well-being tend to stop saying even if they privately say hey, I'm not buying this story publicly what they appear to do is to fall in line with a narrative and so when you have Christian Anderson
And a large group of very degreed and otherwise trained virologists claiming that they have looked at the virus in question and that it is completely inconsistent with a laboratory origin.
And then you have a vast chorus of people who have been trained in other things saying, yes, that's obviously, you know, a valid scientific consensus.
And those who step out of line are portrayed as absolutely crazy and known to be so and all of that.
What it does...
is it creates a pronounced bias in that which is discussed and my point is this looks very much like forcibly through incentive creating confederates of the experiment who say the wrong thing and it is said so regularly that most people will conform to it for the same reason that the subjects of the Ash experiment conform to it and so
The term for this, and I must say there's a part of me that wonders if it's not going to turn out that I have somehow borrowed this term from Eric because very often he coins terms and occasionally they get borrowed by accident, but the term I believe should be astroturfing.
So you're going to have to define astroturfing.
Well, astroturfing is a false grassroots campaign.
Like, imagine you were to hire an army of people to pretend to be irate about something and, you know, protest it so it looked like there was a large number of people demanding something that a large number of people were not, in fact, demanding.
Astroturf, reference to false grass that was invented for stadiums in which there wasn't enough sunlight because there were domes or whatever.
I think they were invested.
Yeah, because astroturf, the astros.
The Astrodome.
That's where it's going to come from.
I don't know.
I would have guessed maybe the space program.
The space program.
Yes!
The space station... Not the site.
I just... I would have guessed it might have come from the space program, that's all.
Yep.
Alright.
I could see it.
It's possible that the Astrodome comes from the kind of thinking that people involved in the space program would have deployed.
I don't know.
But in this case, I think it's beside the point.
Really, all I'm getting at... We're pretty good generalists, but when it comes to the particulars of the Astrodome, I think we're both way outside of our wheelhouse.
So far.
Yeah, we're so far outside the wheelhouse.
We're not even on the boat anymore.
We're adrift.
But that's the wheelhouse.
It's the yeah.
All right.
In any case, astroturfing, I believe is the use of punishment
For those who speak an obvious truth that causes a false consensus to trigger most people to fall in line through the mechanism demonstrated by Solomon Ash That's the point and I think if we look at it that way if you look out at the landscape of people on social media, you know Especially people who have training enough that they could analyze some of these more difficult questions and you find a bizarre lack of you know
Discussion of something that you would imagine would be widely discussed.
You know, if doctors were seeing patients injured by vaccines, you would imagine that there would be a lot of discussion of that.
And if you don't see that discussion, it does tend to cause you to imagine Right, right.
actually, this isn't being widely seen.
What you don't intuit is that it may be that it's not being widely discussed in the place that you can see it.
Right.
Right.
And I do think this ties in nicely with the excerpt that I read from chapter one of A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century with regard to the need for generalists and the need in an ever more complex world for everyone to have some ability to switch domains, to do some domain switching and to perceive, you know, not just so that they have facility in multiple kinds of thinking, multiple kinds of modes of knowledge,
that humans have, but also so that they can view their own, what they may still view as their home domain, with something like outsider status.
You can't ever totally get outside of what you fully know.
We've all experienced this, teachers know this probably best, parents know this, that something that is fresh to you, brand new, that you see it with different eyes, and the more you know it, the longer you've done it, the harder it is to get into the headspace of someone who is naive about it.
And I think the more domains you know, the more you're sort of always a little uncertain, a little bit off balance, a little going, okay, yes, this is my place, this is my field, but no, I don't have as much total depth in terms of what everyone is saying across every little part of this domain, because I also have expertise over there and there and there and there.
And so it affords you a kind of useful outsider status, which I think my prediction would be that this would be more likely to render you ash negative.
I would agree.
It does render you ash negative.
I think actually there were two connections in what you read that are important.
I'll try to remember the second one, but the first one that you're pointing to, A, you have to realize that when, you know, when an expert shows up on television or somewhere that, you know, an expert on something related to COVID, they are definitely unlikely to be expert in the many domains that are covered by COVID, right?
If they're an epidemiologist, They're not an evolutionist, they're not a chiropractorologist, they're not a doctor.
He's a bad guy.
Right.
So the point is, everybody is out of their depth in most of the realm.
And as long as we understand that there isn't anybody who steps out of that, there's nobody who's had these particular set of disciplines as training.
Therefore, we all have to realize, you know, when we, people don't see us coming because our expertise is evolutionary.
The point is, yeah, actually that does fit here because all of these things are evolved phenomena, you know, whether it's, you know, the immune system, whether we're talking about the viruses, whether we're talking about the population versus individual level phenomena.
And you listen to some of the virologists talk sometimes and it becomes just crystal clear to an evolutionary biologist How little they understand about how evolution functions and what is actually going on at the evolutionary level, and yet they, many of them right now, these deep specialists, virologists and vaccinologists in particular, so it's sort of like virologists, vaccinologists, epidemiologists, public health experts, public health experts being a sort of a looser
affiliation, have all claimed to have the and only the relevant expertise in some of these COVID domains.
And when I have heard really almost any of them try to say anything about the evolutionary implications of what's going on or how we might have gotten here, it is revealed very quickly that they don't know what they're talking about.
We have made no claims to being vaccinologists or virologists or pharmaceutical experts or any of this, but what we have is a lifetime of evolutionary biology, which applies to all of this, and being generalists, like having knowledge, having dipped into varying degrees of depth, so many different domains, both within academia and outside of it,
That it allows us an ability to see patterns where others might not.
And what neither of us will hold any truck with is being told, no, you don't.
You stay in your lane.
This is ours to talk about.
This is ours to talk about and decide.
We're going to do it behind closed doors.
And then after we do it, maybe we'll tell you what we decided, but we're certainly not going to tell you why we decided.
Yeah, this is a virology question, and therefore not an evolutionary question.
Doesn't make any sense.
Doesn't make any sense.
Right?
It is inherently both.
And there's nothing wrong with, you know, virologists not being well-schooled in evolution as long as they know it.
And as long as they know why it would be relevant to have such expertise.
Right.
Okay, so the second way in which what you read is relevant to this has to do with the battle over whether or not the dictates that are handed down from on high are accurate enough that we should basically default to just applying them, right?
And maybe looking askance at anybody who's breaking ranks.
Or, if the people who are in charge don't know what the hell they're doing, or worse, are doing something that isn't motivated by an interest in public well-being, and we have to become conscious.
And that's the question.
The model that you read about there, our model is That the mind defaults to this sort of conservative cultural mode, that is to say the wisdom of the ancestors, as long as the ancestor's wisdom is applicable to the current moment, it's liable to be much better than trying to fumble your way through consciously in some new fashion.
And when there's evidence that the ancestral wisdom is no longer applicable because you're in circumstances the ancestors didn't know anything about or for other reasons, then you have to go into conscious mode and figure, well, what are we going to do?
And so in some sense, watching, you know, Pierre Corey and the frontline COVID-19 critical care alliance shut down as if other people know how to deal with COVID when these are clinicians who have been treating COVID in the hospital.
It's like, what the hell just happened, right?
You don't know what, how to treat COVID.
In fact, your treatment for COVID involves sending people home with Tylenol to sicken at home, right?
So why, how do you shut down the people who have consciously figured out better ways?
In fact, the act of diagnosis of a medical problem or societal problem, or the act of trying to figure out what might explain an observed pattern in science, and trying to get all of the observed hypotheses on the table, this is an explicit act of consciousness.
You cannot do this from your set-and-forget, in-the-zone mode.
You can do some of the later parts of clinical work, presumably, and hypothesis testing.
If you're running gels, if you're doing some, you know, same-all, same-all sort of technique that you've done hundreds of times and you get better at the more you do it, that can be cultural.
But the part where you figure out what might be true, that's inherently conscious.
So I guess to finish that, what we're being told, what Dr. Corey's being told over there and what we're being told sort of writ large with regard to our media presence is, You're not allowed to consider some of these hypotheses.
And by doing so, you are being anti-scientific, which of course is exactly the opposite.
And really, again, and I just think it's sort of broken record time here, but the act Of talking about all possible hypotheses is the scientific approach and it is the way.
It is the way that we will solve problems and make progress.
It is the only way.
We might occasionally happen on to the right answer having dismissed other possible alternatives without fully investigating them.
Sometimes we'll get lucky.
We cannot build a society based on expecting good luck.
This makes no sense at all.
Yeah, it makes no sense at all.
And, you know, the evidence is available that would tell you that the equivalent of the ancestors here, and I think, you know, Tony Fauci stands in.
And in fact, what he has been caught saying that to disagree with him is to disagree with science.
You know, it sounds very much like a religious dogma, right?
That he is the Oracle who delivers the science and This is very much not how it works.
And all you have to do is go back to the lab leak and say, well, how did the Oracle perform on that one?
Right.
And the point is the Oracle and everything it was connected to, we now know from his emails, was lying.
It knew way more than it was willing to share.
And so the question is why... The Oracle was not merely wrong.
The Oracle was lying.
The Oracle was lying and That Oracle is now telling you equally dogmatic things, and you have a number of, you know, Cassandra, whistleblower, canary in the coal mine types saying, hey, this is not what we are seeing, right?
There is very clear evidence that there are other possibilities available to us.
Why are we not talking about them?
And so here's the question.
Do you want to default to the Oracle again and think, well, maybe, you know, maybe the Oracle is, you know, slept it off and is now telling the truth?
Or is maybe the Oracle not the place to go?
And we have to be in conscious mode, which I agree is scary.
The fact that nobody knows what to do about COVID is scary.
On the other hand, people are figuring it out.
Yeah.
And there has been a conflation, and this always happens, with you want to talk about X, therefore you think X is the only possible resolution to this problem.
To talk about explicitly the three topics in COVID that are the most fraught that we have been talking about for a long time and have gotten the most flack for, lab leak, vaccine safety and whether or not ivermectin is an effective prophylaxis and treatment for COVID.
Or repurpose drugs more generally, ivermectin being the conspicuous case.
Yeah, the third case being might repurpose drugs I don't even know how to frame it though.
So yes, those three things.
Sorry.
I derailed you.
Okay, three things we take the most flack for, right?
You were... I don't know.
Well, okay, so we've got oracles, we've got topics on which we are forbidden and punished and stigmatized for speaking out of turn, but, you know, my point, and I will continue to make this point, you'll see it in various places over the next week, but my point is, you've got certain anomalies that indicate that what you're being told by the oracle again isn't true.
And lots of people, you know, Sagar and Jetty made a tweet today, says, I don't know anything about Ivermectin.
However, I can see the censorship, right?
Yeah.
No, I mean, this is the point.
Maybe, you know, maybe Ivermectin isn't it.
It seems likely that hydroxychloroquine isn't it, but hydroxychloroquine actually got an EUA early last year, right?
That was being dismissed, even having passed one of the hoops that it had to jump through to get into a discussion.
It seems likely that it's not nearly as promising as some people thought a year and more ago.
Whereas, there is actually just out now, there's a new meta-analysis, right?
It's a meta-analysis that we've actually talked about on the podcast.
It's been circulating.
It's now finally published in a peer-reviewed journal.
I think that was it.
It's right here.
Yeah.
All right.
Zach, you can show this if you like.
This is published in the American Journal of Therapeutics.
Andrew Bryant is the lead author.
Tess Lowry is the second author, and there are many more.
It's called Ivermectin for Prevention and Treatment of COVID-19 Infection, A Systematic Review, Meta-Analysis, and Trial-Sequential Analysis to Inform Clinical Guidelines.
The methods they use, meta-analysis methods in general, I'm not very familiar with, and I specifically am not familiar with the methods they've used.
So I cannot, from first principles, assess the analysis on its merits.
But this is consistent with many of the other conclusions that we've seen, that they basically find that yes, in this case, the particular repurposed drug we're talking about is ivermectin, Yeah.
And it looks really, really promising.
So I want to point out a couple of things.
I don't know any of these authors except Teslari.
But she is one of the premier analysts in the world, right?
This is squarely in her wheelhouse.
This is a meta-analysis generated by at least one of the world's leading experts in how to do this kind of analysis.
And I would point to one thing.
I still think the world, even the world of people, That is aware of the promise of several repurposed drugs, ivermectin, budesonide, fluvoxamine.
Even that world, I believe, is largely still missing the point on ivermectin because there is a focus ...on the value in treatment.
And the value in treatment is a very noisy phenomenon because, among other things, how early you get to it matters a lot.
So to the extent that a study waits five days, right, the evidence is a lot weaker for the effectiveness than one that treats before a test even comes back on the basis of first symptoms or exposure to somebody who's been sick.
Right.
So in any case, one of the things in this meta-analysis... So there's a category error in the data, is what you're arguing.
Well, what I'm arguing... Not just, it's mostly focused on treatment rather than prophylaxis, but within even the treatment category, there is a lot of noise, and in some ways it's going to be Yeah, I mean in fact, let's put it this way.
because no one actually is claiming, as far as I've seen, that ivermectin is going to be a very effective treatment late in the progression of a bad case of COVID.
Yeah, I mean, in fact, let's put it this way.
Logically speaking, it can't be because one of the things that COVID does is damage a lot of tissues.
And the point is, even if ivermectin were an instant cure, which it's not, you would still have damaged tissues.
And so the course of infection would still, you know, it would still take, the longer you wait, the longer it's going to take to recover.
Yeah, you might stop further damage from happening, but perhaps the damage that's happened already is you're too far gone.
It's damage, and it takes time to heal.
Yeah.
But the point I want to make is within this, there is an analysis of the prophylactic effect, right?
There's a meta-analysis here, and I'm not looking at it right now, but I believe there is a 95% confidence interval between 79% and 91%, I believe?
I don't remember.
a percent confidence interval between 79% and 91%, I believe.
- I don't remember.
- With a mean of 86% effective prophylactically.
- Is it the therapeutic advances here that you're talking about in the abstract?
It's in the abstract, let's see.
So low certainty evidence found that ivermectin that ivermectin prophylaxis reduced COVID-19 infection by an average of 86% with a 95% confidence interval from 79% to 91.
That means the range that within from 79 to 91 there is a 95% confidence that the actual protective effect of ivermectin is in that range.
It could be outside but there's only a 5% chance that it's either lower or higher than that.
So that is amazing, and I would point out, I'm going to explore this fully more, and if anybody watching believes that they've spotted a logical error here, I am open to hearing it.
But 86% is the mean of that level of protection.
That is to say, this meta-analysis, looking at all the places where it's been used prophylactically, comes out with an estimate of 86% effective at preventing people from getting COVID if they're on it prophylactically, right?
That's a very high number.
That number is higher than the numbers that are typically circulated for herd immunity.
That means, so just to fill in the logic here, again if I've got the logic wrong please alert me, but The herd immunity is the level of immunity of a population.
Let's say it's from being infected, right?
When enough people have had a disease that you can't get twice, such that when a person has a disease, that disease has trouble finding another individual who is still susceptible, As soon as the number of individuals that tend to be created by any sick individual, the number of new people who tend to be infected, is less than 1, then your disease is on the way towards extinction.
Right?
If the number is very slightly less than 1, then extinction will take a long time.
If it's a lot less than 1, then it will be very rapid.
But as long as you are below the threshold of 1, you are headed towards driving your pathogen to extinction.
86 is a very high number.
Right.
What that means, and I'm not saying that this is possible at the practical level, though I see no reason it's not as plausible as vaccinating people.
It's a lot simpler to get them this drug.
Well, no.
So to Steel Man, The flip side of that, ivermectinous prophylaxis requires regular compliance.
I agree.
As opposed to showing up once or twice depending on which vaccine you got.
And we see, I don't know all why, but I have some ideas as to why, but we even have pretty low compliance it seems with regard to people going back for their second shot of the Moderna or Pfizer vaccine.
And, you know, if, and I don't think it necessarily would, but if that would translate equivalently to, well, people are going to take one dose of ivermectin and then be done, then you're obviously not going to get the same kind of prophylactic effects, although it does seem like there is very long-term sort of lingering prophylactic effects from this that probably the current prophylactic protocols that are being
That's true.
My point is just simply, first of all, people have been compliant about masks.
Many of them didn't like it, but we managed to get compliance on masks.
Yeah, but there's a public view on that.
Right.
I understand that.
But people also have an interest in not getting COVID.
So anyway, I don't think it's so implausible that given all of the things that people have put up with over the last year and a half, that you could get compliance on something this simple.
But never mind whether you can.
The point is, at the level of the thought experiment, Were you to have a population, any population, that didn't have contact with some other population, in which everybody was 86% protected, that is the equivalent of being above herd immunity levels, or being above the threshold of herd immunity, assuming herd immunity is somewhere 86% or lower.
Right?
That means that the virus, as it infects somebody, has difficulty finding enough individuals who are still susceptible, at that level of protection, for it to be above that R0 value of 1.
Right?
Which means this is, in and of itself, If that number is accurate, and this is a very good analysis, if that number is accurate, it looks to be high enough in and of itself to drive this pathogen to extinction, which then raises questions about Fauci's press conference this week in which he announced a major new three-plus-billion-dollar initiative to find some drugs that work on COVID.
Now, of course, all of the drugs in question would be new fancy under-patent drugs that would be extremely profitable, And, you know, what role that plays in the story, we can't know, but it certainly raises certain questions that I think we have to answer.
Indeed it does.
Maybe then that is a good segue to just sharing a bit of this paper called The Peril of Politicizing Science that was published in the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters a week or two ago.
And then I want to talk a little bit about the role that the NIH is playing in governing how science is done.
Something that, you know, I used to talk to my students, we used to both talk to our students a bit about How the federal granting agencies in the US have driven a market form of scientific inquiry that is to all of our peril, but in general, I wouldn't have thought that that would have had much play outside of a classroom.
But I think everyone now knows that Fauci, for instance, has been for decades now the head of, I always forget exactly what it is, the head of the NIAID, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is an arm of the NIH, which is the National Institutes of Health, and together the NIH and the NSF, which is the National Science Foundation, along with, you know, the DoD and a few others.
But the NIH and the NSF fund the vast majority of biological and medical research in the country, and I think chemistry and physics as well.
And the inside baseball stuff that goes on there is important, actually.
So let's say a little bit about that after I am going to read just a couple of excerpts from this paper.
Zach, you can show it.
This, again, The Peril of Politicizing Science, written by a woman, Krylov, who was born and bred, came of age in the Soviet Union.
She's a chemist.
She's a PhD chemist, working chemist, and has written this paper.
And as she says in this, this is not what I want to be thinking about.
I'm a chemist.
I want to be thinking about chemistry.
But in this I have three short excerpts that I've highlighted here.
One is, simply put, we should evaluate, reward, and acknowledge scientific contributions strictly on the basis of their intellectual merit and not on the basis of personal traits of the scientist or a current political agenda.
Boy, that seems obvious, and yet it is not the world we are living in.
Furthermore, she writes, the issue of science moralization and censorship is older than 20th century totalitarian regimes.
For example, Giordano Bruno was cancelled, burned at the stake in 1600 because his cosmological views were considered to be a threat to the dominant ideology.
The guardians of the truth, his prosecutors, quote, had the desire to serve freedom and promote the common good.
A century later, Leeuwenhoek self-censored his studies and reports for offensive content.
In that case, the offensive content was, I kid you not, observations of spermatozoa in semen.
In 1911, Marie Curie was ostracized for immoral behavior in an affair with a married man following the tragic death of her husband, Pierre Curie.
The chair of the Nobel Prize Committee, Svante Arrhenius, whose name I'm no doubt butchering, wrote to her advising that she not attend the official ceremony for her Nobel Prize in Chemistry in view of her questionable moral standing.
Curie replied that she would be present at the ceremony because, quote, the prize has been given to her for her discovery of polonium and radium, and that, quote, there is no relation between her scientific work and the facts of her private life.
Today, we regard this attempt to cancel Curie on the grounds of her moral impurity as utterly absurd, yet we continue to witness the intrusion of moral arguments into the scientific domain.
This again, a point that I made in that aerial piece that we've talked about, what if we're wrong?
The censors imagine that they are God, that they have a vantage point that no human being before now has had.
And so just one last section here.
The answer is simple.
Our future is at stake.
As a community we face an important choice.
We can succumb to extreme left ideology and spend the rest of our lives ghost chasing and witch hunting, rewriting history, politicizing science, redefining elements of language, And turning STEM, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education, into a farce?
Or, we can uphold the key principle of democratic society, the free and uncensored exchange of ideas, and continue our core mission, the pursuit of truth, focusing attention on solving real, important problems of humankind.
So, what has happened in COVID is the explicit politicization of science and the weaponization of the idea of science so that it is wielded at people who don't quite get what science is, and that includes a whole lot of scientists, by using the hashtag, follow the science, and by Fauci saying, if you disagree with me, you disagree with science, and people buy it, because we are effectively illiterate with regard to science as a society at this point.
Let me just say something about the NIH before we riff on this.
Most science is now big science, meaning that it costs a lot of money to do.
And that doesn't mean that big science is better science.
Best science is not expensive science.
It's just the business model of the modern university.
The business model of the modern university has meant that the science that is promoted, the science that is encouraged, from the very moment you enter graduate school until you are getting full professor tenure, full professorship, is encouraging you, if you are a scientist, to do science that is expensive.
The kind of science that you and I did in the field was explicitly low-cost science.
Big science, small science makes it sound like those are indicators, those adjectives are about importance, and they're not.
Basic science similarly, right?
Basic science is that science for which you don't yet have an idea of what the implications for human human flourishing might be.
What it is is I see a pattern, I want to know what explains it, I'm going to try to figure it out.
And so certainly trying to figure out the underpinnings of tent making in bats in rainforests in Panama, or the sex lives of poison frogs in the rainforests of Madagascar That was basic science, right?
You know, there was nothing there that was about, you know, drug discovery or, you know, or anything else.
But what it does, in part, is a, it increases human knowledge, but it also increases the facility of the brain that is doing it, such that if you as a graduate student start off Already on someone else's mega project because that is the kind of science that is encouraged to be done because that is the business model of the universities.
You never get a chance to say, wait, how about this?
What about if?
And as a result, those people who are getting PhDs who got shunted into other people's labs who have big NIH grants and NSF grants and are just expected to do little tiny pieces of puzzles that the PIs, the principal investigators and their mentors are already doing.
Never had the chance to actually become scientists.
They don't know what they're doing at a really, really necessary level.
They may fully understand how to do the methodology that they were trained to do, and presumably they know how to read the literature, I hope, and interpret it and make sense of it.
But the absolutely necessary, kind of unteachable part of the scientific method is, I see something, I'm going to try to explain it, what are all the possible explanations for that thing?
That is this hard-to-explain-to-someone-else-how-you-do-it-but-utterly-necessary part of science that is being tamped down by the business model that is now dominant.
So university professors, so just a little bit about how it works is university professors or researchers usually get these federal grants, again usually NSF, NIH, the branches of NIH, the branches of NSF, DOD, that sort of thing, that they need to do their work and they don't receive those grants directly.
They are fed directly through the grants offices, which take an overhead rate.
Truth in advertising here, I actually worked at one of these grants offices between earning a bachelor's degree in anthropology and before starting my PhD in biology.
I worked at the grants office at UC Santa Cruz.
For a year, and what I saw there shocked me.
Shocked me to my core, such that, before I say some numbers here, such that eight or nine years later or whenever after I'd gotten my degree and I was applying to jobs and I had made the shortlist at a couple of institutions including Evergreen, And I was now on campus doing like this two or three day interview and the committee that was doing the hire was before me and one of the questions they asked me was, when do you expect to apply for your first NSF grant?
And without thinking carefully enough about it, although I'm now pleased that I did this, I said, oh, I really don't want to play those games.
Now, at most schools, that would have been the death knell for me as a candidate.
At Evergreen, this is part of why we have defended what Evergreen was and could be before it got gamed.
At Evergreen, it wasn't because we weren't required to do the game playing with NSF and NIH that everyone else does.
I do have more to say, but I see you want to interject.
Yeah, first of all, I want to say, whenever Green was founded, it was understood, actually, there was a certain amount of suspicion about grant getting, because there was an understanding of the kind of corruption that it brings to an intellectual environment.
And that was largely lost at the point that we were there.
But there was, you know, there were still some people around who got it.
But I wanted to point out that what Heather's going to describe about the way this works and what it drives inside of the university has resulted in lots of stuff that you have encountered, but you don't realize that it's playing this role.
So for example, If it is true that professors are valued by their schools in large measure based on how much money that they bring in, because that money, half of it or more, can go to the university, right?
It's the thing that builds the buildings and pays for everything.
If that's the thing that is prioritized, then what you end up is accumulating, you end up accumulating a whole faculty full of people who see things in terms of big experiments.
What you don't get is theory.
And I don't mean theory in the way that that term has been abused, but I mean that you don't have theorists.
And basically the point is, science involves an oscillation between Hypothesis generation and test.
Ultimately, theories are the product of this if a test goes sufficiently well.
But the point is, you can't cut the theorists out.
You cut the theorists out, you're no longer doing science.
And when you describe these people who work in these big labs and they do their very narrow thing, I would say it is not that they don't know how to do science.
They know how to participate in science, but they can't do the whole process because the process is an integral process and they've done one little aspect of it.
They're like an assembly line worker of science.
And that's a very dangerous phenomenon, but increasingly what we have are whole faculties that are staffed by people who've come from one side.
And the thing, you know, I regard myself as a theorist as much as I sort of want to roll my eyes when somebody says they're a theorist, but nonetheless, it's most of what I've done that's important.
The problem is, a theorist would never say that we could dispense with the experimentalists.
They would never think of it, right?
The experimentalists are fundamental to figuring out which hypotheses were right.
You just can't cut them out.
But the experimentalists very often see their work as primary and the theory as annoying.
So what they do, you know, because what does a theorist really need?
You know, they need access to a library.
They definitely, pencils are good.
You need a chalkboard, right?
You probably want some PowerPoint software, but it's not expensive stuff, right?
And so, you know, the idea of what do the data say, data driven, all of these things are actually cryptic.
Metrics first.
Right.
They are an attack on science as a large process that works because the method is so robust.
They also insist on controlling absolutely as much as possible, which is part of the scientific method, but they regard any investigation in which you cannot, by virtue of the question, kind of squidgy and not quite scientific.
And so I would add to your theorist versus experimentalist or theorist versus empiricist, distinction, because I'm much less of a theorist than you are.
I've had my moments, but I'm much more of actually a hypothesis generation experimental design.
I'm particularly good at experimental design, but it's in places where you cannot control all of the noise.
There's an inside-outside dichotomy as well.
There's an empiricist-theorist dichotomy, and there's an, do you work in the lab or do you work in the field?
And that's not to say that all lab work is reductionist.
It's certainly not.
And that's not to say that all field work is inherently holistic or well done.
It's certainly not.
But doing work outside, asking questions of systems where you have not gotten rid of all the things that you think are extraneous, and guess what?
Maybe some of the things you got rid of that you thought were extraneous were actually the explanatory factor you were looking for.
When you're outside, you have to deal with so much more of the noise of the system that you have to get really good at seeing pattern and at understanding when hypotheses are actually alternative to one another as opposed to subsets of one another, and at figuring out how it is that you would design an experiment that would really tease apart two hypotheses as opposed to kind of answer both and leave them both on the table.
Like that work, as much as the particular, you know, my particular findings about three different kinds of male territoriality in Mandela, La Vagada, for instance, just to name one of the things that I discovered, you know, at one level, who cares?
Okay.
But at another level, it was exactly that work that trained me through just, you know, day after day, week after week, month after month, living in the rainforest to figure out how to discern possibilities when And also to see when all the possibilities aren't on the table.
Yeah, absolutely.
Now, there is something else.
You want to finish that and then I'll come back to it?
Yeah, let me just finish this.
So, one thing I learned at that grants office that I worked at for a year between undergrad and grad school back in the early 90s was that there's an overhead rate, and there's a lot of different rates, but broadly speaking, the overhead rate is the rate that the university that the researcher who is applying for the grant works at will take before the researcher ever gets any of the money.
And it makes sense, right?
If you are hired, even if you are tenured and you're getting your salary from the university, but the fact is if you're doing big science, you're going to need a big lab, you're going to need a lot of real estate on the campus, all of this.
And so the university does have a reason to be able to say, hey, you know what?
Some of that grant money that you're getting has to come back to us.
And We're actually going to not just make sure the library is in excellent shape because you're using our library, aren't you?
But also make sure the walkways are in excellent shape and everything else associated with the university.
We are going to take our overhead and we are going to apply it to whatever we feel like.
We are not responsible for applying it to anything in particular, for the most part.
For research done on campus at American universities and the university just takes this overhead before the PI ever has access to it again.
The PI is just the principal investigator on the grant and so I just did a brief search for university overhead rates and then had to make sure that I was looking at again because there are so many types.
Research done on campus in American universities And the five that popped up first, I was not being selective, I just, the five that popped up first, there was one that popped up in the middle that had a very confusing table and I couldn't make sense of it, so it's excluded, not because it didn't fit, but because it didn't make sense.
UT Austin, the overhead rate is 58.5%.
That is to say that for every million dollars that a researcher brings in, 585,000 of those dollars go to the university and the researcher never gets that.
At the University of Utah, it's 52.5% is the overhead rate.
At Harvard, it's 69%.
At the University of Washington, it's 54.5%.
And at USC, it's 65%.
I saw nothing below 50 or above 70.
It's actually a little bit of a climb.
I couldn't find my notes.
I did take notes on what I was seeing back when I was a I used to work in the grants office back in the early 90s, but my memory was that they were between 40 and 65, that there were at least some that were below 50, and I'm seeing none that are below 50 at this point.
So what does that mean?
It means that the universities have an incentive to encourage the biggest research possible, because the more grant money that comes in, the richer the universities get.
That is going to mean, for instance, that scientists who have the capacity to bring in big research are going to be favored over scientists who aren't, which is exactly the point that Pratt was making.
It also means that scientists in general are going to be favored over other kinds of faculty.
And one of the ways that favoritism happens is by relieving scientists disproportionately of some of the other responsibilities of being faculty.
And in general, what faculty are required to do is three types of things.
Research, teaching, and governance.
Governance meaning the kinds of stuff that helps the university run.
Being on committees, helping do hires, helping decide, you know, whether or not a department needs to needs to be established, etc, etc.
It's largely thankless work.
It takes time away from what you really want to be thinking about, largely, because if you're faculty you have chosen not to become an administrator, probably.
So it's administrative work that faculty are required to do, and one of the things that universities do in order to reward scientists who are bringing in grants is relieve them of some of their governance load.
What does this do?
This means that faculty in other disciplines, for instance fill in the blank studies disciplines, the grievance studies disciplines, are more represented in governance roles.
And so since big money, since NSF and NIH grants have been driving university protocols for Well, not in half a century at this point.
We can expect that what you see is governance by people in disciplines who don't know science, who don't do science, who don't understand it and don't respect it, being more and more responsible for making the decisions that decide the future of universities.
This is at least one big piece of why it is their universities are in as big a mess as they are now.
Yeah, I mean it's a huge piece of it and I would also just point out that this feeds into the pressure that causes scientists, you know, in that unheard piece that you referenced.
I make the point that effectively the economic pressure surrounding the cutthroat competition to get to a job that has any sort of security inside of the university That that drives the development of these narratives that are just wrong, right?
So the point is, if you want a really big grant, making the argument that we have to study these coronaviruses right away because we are in a race against the clock, one of them is going to leap out of a cave, it's going to create a giant pandemic, it's going to be a disaster if we don't figure out how these things function, etc., etc., etc.
And the point is, I don't think that's true.
I don't think they're very likely to leap out of the cave.
I think the most likely thing to happen is that you're going to enhance them to see what would happen if one did leap out of the cave, and you're going to create it, and basically your lab is the cave now, right?
Yeah.
Also, if effectively the grievance studies scholars are increasingly driving the future of universities, What we have as well are the directors of the NSF directorates and the head of the various directorates of the National Institutes of Health, like the one that Fauci has been head of for many decades now, are effectively steering science.
And so we have universities being steered by something that is anti-scientific, and we have science being steered by something that is pro-profit.
And it is not inherently anti-scientific, but it will have perverse incentives that will cause it to make very, very bad decisions and either be blind to them or perhaps lie about them if they're not blind to them.
And actually, one of the things that it does is it rewards inefficient thinking, right?
So one of the things that drove me crazy as a theorist was that there is a large fraction of the landscape of possible things that could be true that you don't need to bother studying because they can't be true in light of the fact that you're talking about evolved creatures.
In other words, you don't expect to have an animal with some large fin on its head if the fin on its head doesn't do anything.
You don't need to worry about the fact that if there's a fin, it's there for a reason, right?
And so the point is, a theorist can save a ton of money by just saying, actually, that part of the map is unlikely to be filled in.
Your answer is over here, right?
A good theorist can do that.
And the point is, nobody wants that person around if the idea is, can we think of some really expensive experiments we could do?
And your point is, oh, you could do that one.
It's like, well, you don't need to do that one.
We already know the answer to what you're going to find.
You're going to spend $20 million running some giant research program to find out something that you could figure out on first principles.
So anyway, there's kind of this antipathy for theorists because they are able to make the work of the university more efficient, which we should all want.
This is tax money that's being spent.
- Theorists are like repurposed drugs in this regard.
- Theorists are like repurposed drugs.
That's going to be a very confusing sentence if anybody abstracts it.
No, but you know exactly what I'm saying, right?
I know exactly what you're saying.
Theorists are not desired by those who would increase the inefficiency of the system in order to get more grant money.
And repurposed drugs are not desired by those who would increase the profits of the pharmaceutical companies.
Exactly, exactly.
Now here's the question.
If you incentivize people to make, you know, scientists are more or less like employees who have to keep arguing to keep their job, right?
You mean faculty, university scientists?
Yeah, I don't mean scientists in the positive sense of that term.
I mean scientists as we are now creating them.
And so you've got this incentive system to figure out reasons that lots of money should flow your way and your university is barking down your neck.
You know, trying to get you to do it better.
And the point is, well, what effect does it have on our collective scientific thinking that we are rewarding scientists for thinking inefficiently, which is exactly what we're doing, right?
We are rewarding inefficient thinking, and we are rewarding wasteful behavior.
And the point is, that does not Scientists, even good ones, are going to have a hard time, you know, completely compartmentalizing their wildly inefficient side that makes them profitable to their universities from their efficient, you know, analytical thinking side that actually figures out what's going on in nature, right?
So, anyway, we've got a system that's really badly designed from the point of view of figuring out what's true, and I think we're just suffering the consequences of it.
Oh, yes we are.
I wanted to point out one other thing.
I don't know, were you done with your... So the last thing I wanted to point out was we are in a weird battle over randomized controlled trials versus alternative kinds of evidence like meta-analyses, observational trials, etc.
Now I don't... a friend took me to task recently Saying that they had understood me to say things that sounded like there were no randomized controlled trials for things like ivermectin, which is absolutely not true.
There are randomized controlled trials.
They might be smaller than you would want, and that's where the meta-analysis comes in, that you can compile these things to get the equivalent of a big data set.
But I do want to point out, on your thread there, about the difference between indoor scientists and outdoor scientists, and this is why we were wearing field hats and wielding machetes a couple Weeks ago.
Yeah, there's the machete still there.
Yeah But the reason we were doing that was that we're having this kind of whiplash Where people are pretending that the only kind of evidence that you could possibly deduce anything from our giant expensive Trials when in fact those of us who have worked outside know that you can deduce a hell of a lot under very suboptimal conditions and so anyway, I wanted to give just one little piece of context for people and Is a meta-analysis as good?
Are we really just waiting for the giant randomized controlled trial?
Well, here's the thing.
You got to understand something about the kinds of error that exist.
A giant randomized controlled trial can suffer from a systematic error that makes it not do what you want it to do, not reveal the pattern.
So imagine, for example, that you had a really, so the value of a really large randomized controlled trial is that it can show you very weak effects, right?
But a randomized controlled trial could also have a bias in it.
Let's say, for example, you wanted to test the question of whether ivermectin or substance X had a positive effect on malady Y. Right?
But let's suppose that the trial had the dosage too low.
Well, now you have a very large data set that says this drug doesn't work.
But if it had been two times higher, three times higher, it would have shown that it worked.
But anyway, the point is, well, the randomized controlled trial didn't show the effect.
Guess it doesn't work.
And the point is, well, actually you just threw out a drug that might have worked.
Right?
You need a different randomized controlled trial.
A group of trials is much less likely to suffer from that, because the point is, some of them will have the dosage too low, some of them will have the dosage too high.
They will tend to average out.
And what you will, you know, the difficulty, the thing that these folks who specialize in this kind of analysis, their difficult job is figuring out how you get data sets from experiments that were done in different ways to give out data that can be compiled.
But they know how to do this, the good ones do.
And what you get in the end is something that is very much more capable of bypassing the individual defects of all of the studies, which will be there because they will tend to compensate for each other.
And so a meta-analysis is much more like, you know, the naturalist doing science under non-optimal conditions, but where if you know how to wield the tools, you figure out how to extract the evidence of the effect.
You're less likely to get a false signal out in nature than in a lab where you have gotten rid of most of all of the rest of the variables, which includes perhaps one of the variables that might actually be explanatory.
Right, right.
And you are very likely to convince yourself.
I mean, just simply imagine the trial in which the dosage was too low for drug X to cure malady Y.
Now you have a really compelling data set because it's huge, right?
Lots of people were given this drug.
It didn't have a measurable effect, right?
Well, why?
Because you're below some threshold and the point is you need multiple of those studies to actually establish this.
So anyway, there's something weird about this obsession with what are admittedly good.
It is nice to have a really big randomized control trial, especially if you're looking for a very weak effect.
Right?
That's how you find the very weak effect is you swamp it with the amount of data.
But in the case that you're looking for a large effect, but that effect varies based on when you administer it or dosage or something like that, you're actually pretty well off to have a bunch of different kinds of studies that will actually even begin to tell you that.
You know, we can look within this data set that says, yes, substance X works on malady Y.
We can also see that those things that had a dosage below this didn't show the effect and those that had a dosage above this did, right?
So anyway, there's something so bizarre about having people wield what sounds like scientific authority in favor of the idea that really there's only one kind of evidence and everything else doesn't exist because most of us don't have the luxury of being able to do those kinds of trials and we know that we do science and we know that it works.
Okay, we've got two more things that we wanted to cover today.
It's all of a type.
I've got a couple of excerpts from 1984, and then we'll follow with something that you found online, and then you wanted to talk about the failure to learn.
You want to start there?
Yes.
Well, I mean, we've partially covered this.
We've done this.
Yeah, the basic idea is it is bizarre that in, like, you know, the echo of the battle over the lab leak hypothesis has not even yet died down, right?
We are still finding stuff in these emails that reveals, you know, just how far off the public narrative was from what people understood behind the scenes.
You mean the Fauci emails?
Yeah.
So the question is why?
Are people not now awake to all of the broken processes that allowed that to go on for so long with such a preposterous public story?
Why have we not said, well, jeez.
Well, you could, I guess it was fine that you were talking about that, but you certainly can't talk about any of the stuff you're talking about now.
Right!
And so, I don't know, let's just do this here, as long as we're on the topic.
So, one interesting case.
One of the podcasts that was taken down by YouTube involved Robert Malone, who is the inventor of mRNA vaccine technology.
Incidentally, still available on the audio podcasts and also available on Odyssey now.
Also available on Odyssey, so check it out.
So Robert Malone in this podcast talks about the toxicity of spike protein, which is something that actually there's a fair amount of evidence of different kinds for.
And this is a very frightening piece of the puzzle, because the spike protein, it appears, does not stay resident.
Some of it probably does, but not all of the spike protein stays resident in the cells that take up the vaccine mRNA, and so it goes floating around the body, and it seems to do damage, right?
In any case, So it's two different issues, though.
Does it stay localized, and is it cytotoxic?
Right.
Well, these are two things that do not match the design.
The intended design of the vaccine would be... Sure.
But the particular thing that you led with, and I think that you're going to, is just about cytotoxicity.
It's not about localization.
Right.
In any case, split effect, which is a Facebook property, I believe...
It is either a Facebook property or it is actively hired by Facebook, and it is at least one of the outfits that does the fact-checking for Facebook.
So it evaluated this claim and declared it false, which is bizarre because there's plenty of evidence for it.
And at the very least, if whatever experts it's using, assuming it uses experts, were uncompelled by the evidence, then what they should have said was, This is undetermined because here's the evidence and here's why we're not convinced.
But that's not what they said, right?
They said it was false.
PolitiFact, of course, though, also once checked the lab leak hypothesis, and they declared it, I quote, a pants-on-fire lie, right?
Now that's an amazing level of, what's the term, ridicule.
It's ridicule.
They ridiculed the hypothesis, right?
And so here's the question.
So were you able to find this, either you or Zach?
I can't find a screenshot of it.
I see it quoted in various places.
We'll try to find it and link it in the program description.
But in any case, the point is, look, you've got Robert Malone, the inventor of mRNA vaccine technology, making a point about spike protein, which is squarely in his area of expertise, and PolitiFact, which is I don't even know what, has decided that he is saying something false.
How it would know that, I can't imagine.
If I remember correctly, and I think I did write this down, the PolitiFact fact-checking piece refers to experts.
That's it.
That's it.
Just experts.
Vague, anonymous, not-to-be-found experts.
They know a guy.
Yeah, they know a guy, but guess what?
I know you.
You know Dr. Malone.
And frankly, I trust you two a lot more than vague, nameless, faceless experts who are just once again doing a political bidding rather than scientific bidding.
Right.
Well, I mean, that's the irony of Robert Malone being fact-checked by experts on the Dark Horse podcast, which was way ahead on the Lab League hypothesis.
It's like, didn't anybody in the organization even notice what podcast they were going after and who it was that they were claiming was saying false things?
It's like, it doesn't add up.
There's no calculus, right?
At best, if they had, you know, somebody who was highly expert, who disagreed with Malone, Right?
And the point is, there is disagreement over this.
That's as far as they could go.
Right?
But the idea that this is a place in which, you know... This is not settled science.
Good.
Let's do that.
How about put that at the top of any of this?
Where we are discussing hypotheses.
This is not settled science.
Well, yes, duh.
We know that.
That's the point of discussing hypotheses.
Right.
And the fact is, of course, that undermines the whole purpose of such a thing, which is if unsettled science... Undermines the purpose of the fact-checking.
Yeah.
The fact-checking is supposedly about improving the conversation by limiting what can be said.
And, of course, if you've got a whole landscape of unsettled science, then pretty much everything in that landscape ought to be discussable.
Well, I, for one, feel improved.
Right.
So, anyway, in some sense they are, at the very least, working to justify their own existence by claiming that you can limit the conversation in productive ways.
But the irony of, you know, who they're fact-checking and, you know, it's jaw-dropping.
Yeah.
Yeah, it is.
It really is.
Let's end with a little bit from 1984, shall we?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
We have read little tiny excerpts from 1984 before, I see, in episodes 22 and 43.
Unfortunately, as we've talked about before, I do think Brave New World is a bit of a better descriptor of the kind of landscape we're in.
Um, but Orwell's no dummy.
Um, and here, I wanted to vet with you before I did this, but we didn't have time, so I'm just going to go ahead and, um, share these two.
This is from, this is, um, a copy of 1984 that was my mother's.
Um, and she got a new copy and gave us this one.
So this is, this is a lovely old copy.
The search for new weapons continues unceased.
Oh, wait, no, sorry.
Hold on.
Ah, here we go.
Science in the old sense has almost ceased to exist.
In Newspeak there is no word for science.
The empirical method of thought on which all the scientific achievements of the past were founded is opposed to the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc.
That's the English Socialist Party.
And it's the dominant party in 1984.
And even technological progress only happens when its products can in some way be used for the diminution of human liberty.
In all the useful arts, the world is either standing still or going backwards.
The fields are cultivated with horse plows while books are written by machinery.
But in matters of vital importance, meaning in effect war and police espionage, the empirical approach is still encouraged, or at least tolerated.
The two aims of the party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought.
There are therefore two great problems which the party is concerned to solve.
One is how to discover against his will what another human being is thinking, and the other is how to kill several hundred million people in a few seconds without giving warning beforehand.
Insofar as scientific research still continues, this is its subject matter.
The scientist of today is either a mixture of psychologist and inquisitor, studying with extraordinary minuteness the meaning of facial expressions, gestures, and tones of voice, and testing the truth-producing effects of drugs, shock therapy, hypnosis, and physical torture, or he is a chemist, physicist, or biologist concerned only with such branches of his special subject as are relevant to the taking of life.
That's obviously hyperbole if you try to map that perfectly onto what is happening today, but it is the purview, it is precisely the purview of these granting agencies, NSF, NIH, DOD, etc.
to decide what kinds of projects they are going to fund.
It is not just that they are saying, bring everything to us and then we're going to choose, depending on what directorate it is, you know, 20%, 8%, whatever.
They actually decide what types of questions you can even write a grant for.
There are certain types of research that you just can't write a grant for.
And it's not at this level, but we are certainly seeing basic research being edited, being curated, being changed by the fact of who is in charge of the agencies, and we know for sure that one of the people who's been in charge of one of the agencies for many decades has not been telling us the truth.
So, final quote from 1984.
It was only after a decade of national wars, civil wars, revolutions, and counter-revolutions in all parts of the world that Ingsoc and its rivals emerged as fully worked-out political theories.
But they had been foreshadowed by the various systems, generally called totalitarian, which had appeared earlier in the century, and the main outlines of the world which would emerge from the prevailing chaos had long been obvious.
What kind of people would control this world had been equally obvious.
The new aristocracy was made up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade union organizers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists, and professional politicians.
These people, whose origins lay in the salaried middle class and the upper grades of the working class, have been shaped and brought together by the barren world of monopoly industry and centralized government.
This last difference was cardinal.
numbers in past ages, they were less avaricious, less tempted by luxury, hungrier for pure power, and above all, more conscious of what they were doing and more intent on crushing opposition.
This last difference was cardinal.
By comparison with that existing today, all the tyrannies of the past were half-hearted and inefficient.
The ruling groups were always infected to some extent by liberal ideas and were content to leave loose ends everywhere, to regard only the overt act, and to be uninterested in what their subjects were thinking.
Even Even the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages was tolerant by modern standards.
Part of the reason for this was that in the past, no government had the power to keep its citizens under constant surveillance.
The invention of print, however, made it easier to manipulate public opinion, and the film and the radio carried the process further.
With the development of television and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end.
Every citizen, or at least every citizen important enough to be worth watching, could be kept for 24 hours a day under the eyes of the police and in the sound of official propaganda, with all other channels of communication closed.
The possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience to the will of the state, but complete uniformity of opinion on all subjects now existed for the first time.
He's writing in 1949.
He foresees a lot, and he doesn't see exactly what we've landed at in 2021, of course, but have we lost all privacy, many of us?
Yes, we have.
Some of us have made choices that allow us to keep small shreds of it, but this this is unfortunately prescient.
So he's writing two years before Solomon Asch did his experiment.
That's amazing because in part he's describing both of these things, the loss of privacy and the control of thought through enforced conformity.
That's right.
Wow.
Well, that's a cheery thought.
Yes.
Welcome to Episode 84 of the Dark Horse Podcast.
Indeed.
All right.
Are we at the end?
I think we are there.
Okay.
So we are going to take a 15-minute break, as we always do, and then we'll be back with a live Q&A, not on YouTube, but right here on Odyssey, answering questions that you have posed using the hashtag on Twitter, Undeterred.
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So as I always end with and as you are now insisting on finishing with different words, be good to the ones you love and eat good food and get outside.