#104: Locusts of Control (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 104th 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.How can higher education be saved? The University of Austin launched this week, to much enthusiasm, some ridicule, and cautious optimism. We discuss what higher ed in general, and UATX in particular, needs to consider, including that faculty need to know something real, be able to communicate it, and have a fundamental beli...
Hey folks, welcome to this remote Dark Horse podcast live stream.
I, of course, am Dr. Brett Weinstein.
This is Dr. Heather Hying, and we are excited to be here on a Sunday, which is not our typical.
It's not, it's not.
So you can, for those of you watching, you can tell we're on a different set with this beautiful piece of art behind us.
That's about all that is true that we're going to say here.
We are going to talk about, well, we were delayed by quail a little bit, a little bit yesterday, which is to say we saw quail.
And yes, we were also having some technical difficulties, but we saw quail and we watched quail.
I will say that we, together, were blocked by quail.
I was not frightened.
You think I was?
Was I quailing?
I don't know if you were frightened, but I sort of took you to be frightened, and that's the way in which we were detained.
I see.
By quail.
But anyway, I did not frighten.
That's terrific.
So we're going to talk a bit today about higher education, and about religion, and about apologies, and about fluvoxamine, and giraffes.
Redux, a little update on the giraffe story that we talked about last week.
But first, some logistics.
Hunter Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century continues to be available.
Please consider getting it and reading it and talking about it if you have not yet.
We are, for now, streaming on both YouTube and Odyssey.
The live chat is on Odyssey.
You can ask questions.
We've already got some questions since we announced late yesterday that we were not going to be streaming yesterday.
You can ask questions at darkhorsesubmissions.com, and you may are encouraged to join either or both of our Patreons.
We do a monthly private Q&A at mine, and Brett does a couple of smaller Zoom conversations with some of his Patreons at higher tier levels once a month as well.
We consider coming over to Natural Selections, my substack, where every Tuesday there's a free post.
This last week I wrote about why we should not be transitioning children, medically or surgically, and next week I'll be talking about higher ed and some of what we are going to be talking about today, and a bit more as well.
But first, we have three ads today.
Because we are not in our usual spot, we don't have the usual – oh, we do have the green Okay, so there's no sound.
For those of you listening, usually you have a sound coming into the ads and a sound going out.
So close your eyes and imagine a green border unless you're driving.
In which case, imagine what color border?
Yeah, we are not driving instructors, but I think in this case we will recommend that if you are driving, leave your eyes open.
Yes, not in a position to give professional advice here.
Unless you sneeze, in which case you may briefly have to close them.
But as briefly as possible, that would be my advice.
That's excellent, excellent advice as always.
All right, three ads today.
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Point of order.
In this case, ground beef is as opposed to steaks.
It is not as opposed to arboreal beef.
Nope.
Nope.
They actually do not yet deliver the tree cow beef.
No.
No.
We should talk to them about that.
Yeah.
Okay.
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Yep.
Just color commentary.
I think that's more or less where I was.
Okay.
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But in no way randomized.
Right.
No.
Random walking.
Well, actually, random walking is kind of a thing, but more a thought experiment.
Markets, that sort of phenomenon.
Yes, indeed.
All right.
All right.
Those of you who are driving, keep your eyes open.
The rest of you can open them back up.
Yes, yeah, exactly.
Okay.
So, we, like I said, we're going to talk a little bit about higher ed today to start, in part because the University of Austin was announced this week, now six days ago, to some jeers, but a lot of cheers, and I am cautiously optimistic that this really could be the institution that many of us have been waiting for.
We, of course, have a lot to say about what higher ed can be and what it should not be, and we've written some about this in various places.
I'll be, again, writing more about it for my Substack on Tuesday.
One thing that I will say to start is that
It is true that much of the thing that catapulted us into the public eye in part was that Evergreen blew up in the midst of a woke revolution, an ideology that affords no dissent and is not interested in really pursuing uncomfortable truths very effectively, if at all.
In fact, some Some believers in the ideology, the woke ideology if you will, actually dismiss ideas like merit and absolute truth, objective reality.
And obviously a university in which that is happening is not going to be very effective at educating people, nor is the research that takes place at such a university going to be necessarily the best research that could be happening.
You know, some research programs may continue sort of under the radar of such a thing, but many research programs won't.
But that thing, that thing that is taking over universities in very modern times Could not have gotten a hold if the universities weren't already weakened, right?
So, you know, we argue and have argued before and will continue to argue that the woke ideology needs to go.
You know, no successful university can be intact with it in place.
But a university that is free of that will not necessarily free itself of all of the incentives, all of the perverse incentives that have rendered modern universities really out of touch with what a pursuit of truth should engage with.
Yeah, I would argue effectively this is an autoimmune disorder that made the universities vulnerable to wokeism, but what that implies is that if you rid the body academic of wokeism, you won't have cured the underlying disease and therefore it will be vulnerable to other ridiculous ideologies and it will I think you've been gentle here.
It's not that they're failing in their mission.
They're actually engaged in the inverse of their mission.
They're actively miseducating students, and there are lots of reasons that they might do that.
The basic point actually comes down to something that we've said many times on Dark Horse, which is zero is a special number, right?
The idea that in an era in which universities are actively miseducating their students, that there is not a single exception where those of us who find this absurd can send our kids is remarkable.
Because certainly, even if you imagine that most people want this, which most people clearly don't, but even if you imagine, if you grant that most people want this change, There are a lot of us who are alarmed who are now looking around saying, well, OK, we have kids on the verge of college age.
There's literally not a single place to send them.
Yeah, I mean, people, former students with family members who are now trying to go to college and perfect strangers as well.
Contact you and me both.
Generally, we get more than one question a week, and certainly I've gotten many, many of these of late, saying, where can I go?
Where can I send my kids?
Where can I send my cousin?
Given what you guys saw that was possible and were able to do, At Evergreen, because Evergreen really was an extraordinary model that got captured, that got gamed.
Where can they go now?
And for a couple of years, you know, end of 2017, 2018, one of the things I was saying to people was, well, it's quite hard to get into, of course, but the University of Chicago, With its strong stand for freedom of inquiry and the so-called Chicago Principles, it does suggest that that is an institution that is going to resist this sea change.
But no, more modern evidence suggests the University of Chicago, too, is falling, giving further credence to your zero as a special number.
It's falling slower than other institutions, but nonetheless, the fact is, in a market It's not like only the majority gets catered to.
And the fact that there's no institution that will deliver the good that so many of us are demanding, and also, of course, if you project forward, college students who go to an institution that isn't actively miseducating them will also be presumably in high demand in a job market where people actually want stuff done.
And so So, you know, that university will rise through the ranks of all universities as its graduates go on to do important things and be recognized.
So there is a huge mystery at the bottom of this, which is why do we not have at least a diversity of models in competition with each other?
Right.
Instead of universities advertising to future students that they have resort-like grounds and lazy rivers and such, as is the case at, for instance, LSU, we would be, you know, a university could advertise that yes, You will probably have fun here, but you will have fun because a life of the mind is extraordinarily exhilarating and joyous.
And yes, there are other ways to have fun as well, but education, not indoctrination.
And oh, by the way, you're going to be in high demand.
I do not believe in the model of universities as a jobs program, as you do not.
But part of what students who are, you know, thinking about spending four years or more of their life somewhere need to consider is, is this degree ridiculous?
You know, will anyone take this seriously?
And indeed, will I be able to think better about the world on the other end of it?
And all too often, The answer is no, right?
And so one of the things that the University of Austin is going to try to do is stay away from a number of the funding traps that have limited what questions can be asked at other universities, and it's tricky.
And, you know, it involves, you know, there are a number of ways that once you are beholden to especially federal money, then they can change what it is that you do and how you do it.
And so everything from the giant grants, the NSF and NIH and DOD grants and such that faculty are encouraged to bring in, which then drives science faculty into further grant getting and drives other faculty to often grievance studies faculty into positions of prominence and governance.
That's one problem and then the fact that federal organizations like the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health actually end up having say in what kinds of questions get answered by virtue of upregulating some kinds of That's one problem.
When you rely as a university to get any sort of lower or lower middle income students in under Pell Grants, then that's another way that universities have That universities are beholden to the federal government, and then of course accreditation.
And so the accreditation question is one that maybe we'll save mostly for another time, but if you decide that you do not want to be beholden to the accreditors, you are not eligible for things like NSF and NIH grants if you're faculty, or Pell grants if you're students.
But likely, that freedom, that obvious fiscal cost comes with a freedom that is perhaps actually necessary if you are to run a university that is actually able to engage in free inquiry at this point.
Well, so I want to point out, you are on the board of this new effort.
You and I spent a year on a project targeted at the same objective.
Indeed, more than that, 14 months.
The Beringia project.
And that project is not dead, but we put it on permanent pause because we couldn't solve the question of how you get enough resources to bootstrap
A higher ed 2.0 Institution yes to make it actually catalyze and so in any case we did a lot of thinking though in that 14 months about Questions like accreditation in fact I believe that was our very first decision was that accreditation was the mechanism that causes zero to be the number of functional institutions therefore it is a prerequisite to doing anything functional that you escape that and
That you agree to pay the costs of not being accredited and that actually you are likely to reap the benefits at the point that employers keep hiring people who have been turned numbskull by miseducation, right?
At the point that that pattern becomes obvious, and there becomes a second type of applicant that doesn't have the degree from an accredited institution, but does have some degree from an institution that isn't, you know, in catastrophic freefall, right?
At that point, then the system shifts, and those employers will, out of self-interest, be seeking students who have this alternative, whatever it is.
So anyway, that was our, I believe, our first decision on the Berengia Project.
I believe so as well.
And I hope that your project ends up picking up some of the wisdom that we generated because I believe, you know, it has solved the problem we didn't solve.
Right?
It seems to have figured out... It is managing to attract quite a lot of resources already.
It needs more.
Right.
And so in some sense, you've got a question of how do you solve the build an institution question?
You need people who can figure out how to access the resources.
And then there's a question of what do you do with it?
And your point here, I think, is exactly the right one, which is a non-woke institution is a prerequisite to a functional institution, but it is not the institution you should be building if you're headed to academia 2.0.
That's exactly right.
Evergreen was founded in the late 60s, early 70s.
It opened its doors in 72?
Right, but the founding was a couple years before that, because that is always the case with new institutions.
You say, okay, we're launching, but it's going to be a couple years as we try to figure out exactly what we are, we collect the faculty, all of this, just like the University of Austin is planning.
And, you know, some of the founding principles are unlike any for Evergreen, or unlike any that are anywhere else.
And the fact that Evergreen exploded so remarkably and publicly in 2017 does not reveal that those founding principles were flawed.
What it reveals is that they were gameable, that they were capturable, and indeed that they got captured.
I would say something slightly different.
My sense, and what I said when we were teaching there and had no idea that it was going to melt down, is that the founders broke every rule on the book.
Literally, we didn't have departments, right?
We didn't have tenure.
We had things that stood in the place of these things.
Well, at the very beginning, I'm not sure that there was either tenure or departments.
By the time we got there, there was something that was in fact a legal analog for tenure, right?
So we can say we were tenured.
Called conversion, right?
But my point is, pick a rule that functions in a university.
It was broken at Evergreen.
Right?
No faculty member outranked any other faculty member in a technical sense, although there were those who had this equivalent of tenure called conversion, and there were those who didn't, and there were visitors.
But the point is they had neutralized faculty rank.
You didn't have departments.
You grouped by interest area.
And you could move around freely.
You could move around freely.
I was in consciousness studies.
In fact, I was the chair of consciousness studies for two years, I think.
But in any case, the It's instantly hilarious to me that both you and I ended up chairing these sort of, it's not departments, but these things that were, you know, fill-in-the-blank studies, given that most of the fill-in-the-blank studies fields are, you know, woo-woo at best and, you know, and really quite terrible.
But let's actually say just a few words about these before consciousness studies, because that's going to just throw people completely.
Environmental studies, which is the, whatever we called it, planning unit something, we were in and I was, I chaired it briefly before actually jumping ship into consciousness studies, was imagined as an actually interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary group of faculty, many of whom are natural scientists like biologists and geologists, and some of whom are social scientists like, you know, land planners and sociologists.
And it really did bring together a number of the interests that a person would have if they were trying to understand what the environment is and how it is that humans engage with it.
Consciousness Studies!
So Consciousness Studies was slightly mislabeled.
Now, I do have a long-standing academic interest in consciousness, and I've written about it, so in some sense, even if the subject matter was consciousness, it might have been the right place for me.
But what it really was, was faculty who were throwbacks to the initial vision of the college, and were very involved in how to access the consciousness of students.
Exactly.
So it was basically a grouping of people that wasn't about subject matter, it was about academic approach.
Yes.
Which was an interesting thing.
So I would say the lack of departments at Evergreen was not simply correct, and it was not simply a failure as a mixture.
But the point I wanted to make is that the founders threw out every single normal structure, right?
And they replaced it with something.
And half of the things they did Were nonsense and didn't work, and half of the things they did were brilliant and revealed things that you wouldn't know unless you ran the experiment.
And the problem with Evergreen is that it never went back and said, all right, which of the alternative structures that we have here actually proves that there was something useful to be done, and which of them is hobbling?
And so I would just point to this one, which always troubled me.
Evergreen neutralized faculty rank, right?
So no faculty member outranked any other faculty member.
That actually worked surprisingly well at Evergreen, right?
The fact that nobody in a faculty meeting stood up and had more power than anybody else, that actually worked pretty well.
And you know, I was a very outspoken visitor at the beginning of my time teaching.
That's shocking.
But the point is, at a university where I was the lowest ranking person, that would have been very dangerous and probably wouldn't have worked out.
At the point that you started, where at another institution you would have had the title of lecturer or adjunct or something.
Right.
So anyway, this is something that worked.
On the other hand, it was absolutely crippling when you wanted to interact with people from other institutions, because since there was no faculty rank, What they supplanted that with was the term member of the faculty, which if you wrote a letter to the editor and you were a tenured, effectively tenured professor at Evergreen, but you had to say member of the faculty made you sound like
The university hadn't even hired you with an ongoing contract, so it basically subordinated you to the rest of the world.
So anyway, that was a place where they made an error.
There is going to be a tension between those who recognize that hierarchy is abused and too ubiquitous, and those who think that no hierarchy is going to be a solution.
I guess that's actually the same end of the spectrum.
Yeah, there was a move, there was a pendulum swing away from many of the overly hierarchical ways of doing things in the 60s and early 70s with Evergreen's origin, but it went too far, right?
So I did want to actually, the one thing I wanted to say about Evergreen's model was none of this, none of the no departments or faculty rank or titles or anything.
But something that we've talked about before, which was utterly extraordinary and exactly the thing that an excellent undergraduate college education, I believe, can and should
Engage itself with which is full-time programs, which is the immersion of a group of students with one or more faculty in work that goes on for 10 weeks or 20 weeks or 30 weeks, you know up to a full academic year such that Everyone actually gets to know one another and you really do come to be in community with one another and you know Yes, a lot of these sort of, you know modern pedagogy terms like learning community and and such will will sound
We'll sound ridiculous to those who haven't been swimming in these waters, but very quickly at Evergreen, I came to recognize how utterly necessary it was if you actually wanted to reach students who were coming in with all sorts of both expectations and
You know, when I say levels of preparedness, I don't mean that we should always be able to reach people who have neither interest or ability, and those who have the most interest and ability.
But because so much of K-12 schooling is so bad, And such a poor fit for some of the most brilliant people out there.
We had students who had been told throughout their formal schooling that they were stupid, that they shouldn't go to college, that they needed to focus on work in the trades.
And very often when I had students come to me from the trades who would say, I can't do this, I know I'm not really up to this.
What work have you been doing?
You've been working with physical systems successfully, you know, as a forklift operator, as a carpenter, whatever.
And, you know, if you've been doing that successfully and you haven't killed anyone, you know, the things that you're building aren't falling down, of course you have capacity.
And, you know, if you have been told that this kind of capacity that happens in an institution of higher ed is a fundamentally different kind of capacity than what you're doing, then, you know, that's on them, not on you.
So, okay, you point to the full-time programs, and I think people really don't, unless you've been in the system as either student or professor, you really don't understand how radically different this is.
Professors teach one class full-time, students take one class full-time, and it can go on for a full year.
So the level at which you know each other is remarkable.
The other thing, though, coupled with that was the freedom to teach Anything you wanted to teach, in any way you wanted to teach, so long as students showed up and were moderately happy.
The freedom of choice and of inquiry for both faculty and students.
Right.
Now the problem is that system is gameable.
Right?
Professors who want to not teach and be popular can do it in that structure and Evergreen had no way of eliminating them.
So you had lots of people hanging on to jobs that they weren't doing very well So, the point is, how do you get the benefit of the full-time programs, which is amazing for anybody who wishes to figure out what's possible in a classroom, and the benefit of the freedom, without paying the cost of lots of dead wood on the faculty?
So this is a place where, if you took the lesson of what worked at Evergreen, and the lesson of what didn't work, you could figure out what to do for a 2.0 institution.
Indeed.
And this actually, this is a good segue to, and I think I've mentioned it on the show before, my, what I thought was a very low bar, three part, excuse me, A low-bar, three-part rubric for whether or not you should be allowed to educate at any level, really.
But specifically, it's one that I developed for college professors when I was noticing that too many of our colleagues didn't meet one or more of these criteria.
Three-part rubric for whether or not you should be in front of students at all.
You must know something real that you can communicate.
While believing in the fundamental humanity of all of your students.
You don't need to believe that all of your students are equal.
In fact, you shouldn't.
They're not.
They're not the same.
But they all are equally deserving of an opportunity to discover what it is that they are capable of.
And most people arrive At higher ed having been in one way or another failed by their educations to date.
Even and maybe in some ways especially those students who show up with the 4.0s from elite college prep schools with the you know 18 extracurriculars and you know having been having been lauded the entire time for being exactly what the world and their parents and their and their prep schools and their fancy prep schools want them to be.
They too often will show up and we had those students.
We didn't have as many as we would have if Evergreen had been a, you know, a selective elite private liberal arts college rather than a public liberal arts college, but we had those students and some of them were extraordinary and some of them weren't.
But too many of them, and of course this would be true, were in no way motivated from their own internal sense of what it is that they wanted to do in the world.
They all too often had, you know, yes, maybe discovered that this instrument rather than that, and this sport rather than that, but they were better for them.
But they had sort of a checklist, and they would too often come into our classrooms expecting the checklist.
Being motivated by the external carrot and stick people in the front of the room, you know, by the sage on the stage that we were as professors and that all the other professors were.
And frankly, most faculty, it's easier to teach to someone who expects a checklist, because all you have to do is generate the checklist, hand it to them, and if they do meet your checklist, then you write them at Evergreen a good narrative evaluation or at any other school, you know, give them a good grade.
And if they don't, then they get a bad grade.
That's much simpler.
Actually getting to know the person and and trying as we did in very many ways.
We had a lot of different Kinds of assignments by which we tried to reveal to the students that whether they were internally or externally motivated, to discover and become their best selves.
Discover what their passions and skills were and become their best selves.
And if they weren't, if they could be revealed to themselves to be externally motivated, How to change that.
How to move that locus of control from outside to inside.
That is the thing, right?
So I think this rubric is very important.
You need to know something real, you need to be able to communicate it, and you need to fundamentally believe in the humanity of all of your students.
But that first one, knowing something real, I think doesn't necessarily mean what most people think it will mean.
Yeah, this is crucial.
I remember having this conversation with many students who come in confused about a lot of things, right?
Sure.
We had conversations at the beginning of our programs about the fact that the environment seems like a consumer environment where they are the consumer and therefore they're, you know, That it's a market and that you have the rights of the consumer in a market.
No, you're not a consumer of information.
You're also not.
This is not a pseudo job.
You're not producing things in the world that are likely to be important after college.
So what are you doing?
And the recognition, once you strip it down from all of the stuff that looks like some analog for a job or looks like some analog for shopping, What you're left with is that the real purpose of undergraduate education is the upgrading of the mind so that it is capable of high-quality rigorous thought, right?
Now there may be quadrants of the university where that's not a perfect description, but the basic point is you're not really teaching material.
Write to pick up material is useful in the process but you're really using material as a training ground for high quality thinking for the ability to detect what a true idea is and what a. Attractive false idea is and how you would distinguish the two and so.
Can I just add here, I think, there will be faculty everywhere, the good faculty mostly, who will be screaming at this.
They'll say, what are you talking about?
And I think, and apologies if you made this distinction, but there really is distinction here between grad school and undergrad.
And we found in these full-time programs that we could really go deep with students in evolutionary biology, and the kinds of thinking that are in A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century really were developed in part in those classrooms, around campfires, in the field, in the labs with students.
That said, you go to grad school in a subject to become an expert in that subject.
That's what grad school is.
And, you know, professional schools like medical school and law school, the same thing, right?
These are understood to effectively be jobs programs at some level, right?
Undergrad isn't supposed to be that.
And so whether or not you're a philosophy major or a history major or a biology major, by and large, if you're talking about major, and again, Evergreen actually didn't have majors either, But history professors teaching undergraduates shouldn't be imagining that they're training historians, and biology professors teaching undergraduates shouldn't imagine that they're training future biologists, and philosophy professors teaching undergraduates should not imagine that they are training future philosophers.
They are They are teaching people how to have a life of the mind, how to be problem solvers, how to recognize inconsistencies in logic, how to observe and make hypotheses about what it is that they're seeing, whether or not they think they're doing science at all.
All of these things are actually necessary.
And you can get there through history, you can get there through philosophy, you can get there through biology, you can get there through, you know, all Almost all disciplines, with the exception of… All real disciplines.
Right, and I was like, okay, so who gets to be the arbiter of what's real?
Well, a lot of people will agree that a number of the new disciplines aren't real, but there are a tremendous number of ways that you can get to… understanding how to view the world and whether or not you say or on your diploma it says that you specialized in you majored in history or philosophy or literature or anthropology or chemistry or physics or biology.
You should be able to make similar kinds of assessments about the world, rather than think, ah, well, I'm four years into becoming a philosopher.
For some people, that is how they view it.
But for the vast majority of people who don't go on to do anything in their lives that is a match for what their college degree says, consider that, you know, we're not actually, college is not actually supposed to be about that tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of people who go on to graduate school in those subjects.
Yeah, and how devastating in an era where we really don't know what the future is going to look like in terms of what people will do for a living, if that's even how it works.
You know, narrowly targeting some set of information and even skills is a fool's errand, or at least a very serious gamble.
And you know, if you look at what we did, we used evolutionary biology to train minds.
If you thought of us as training people to be evolutionary biologists, You know, I think only a small number, three or four people in our history at the college went on to get PhDs in evolutionary biology.
On the other hand... But that never felt like a failure.
That was never the intention.
And indeed, sorry I'm interrupting you, but I remember, especially since one of my sort of flagship programs is animal behavior, I would say to students at the beginning of a program because so many people think they love animals and therefore they want to be animal behaviorists.
And the fact is that actually doing the work of animal behavior is for most people mind-bogglingly dull or uncomfortable or just not actually what they want to do.
And so I felt like one of my jobs was to make sure that those people who really thought this is what they wanted to do discovered now in college that this is not what they wanted to do so that they could go on to figure out what else they wanted to do.
And still, despite that disclaimer that I would give at the beginning, I would have students who would come to me apologetic.
I don't think I want to do this for a living.
I don't think I want to be a biologist.
To which my reaction was always, great!
Not great, you know, thank God you're leaving, but great.
Terrific that I was able to help you figure out something about what your future might be, even if in this case it is not this.
And you know, these were not students who then said, and I can't be in this program anymore, or I'll never learn from you again.
These were often students who then continued to take programs with me, precisely because they were interested in the material.
They just saw that what they had in their head as being, you know, a wolf biologist in Montana or something was not going to be their future, but they still wanted to learn how to think.
Right, and you know, you can see, if you think about, viewers of the podcast will have been through a certain amount of evolutionary thinking here, you can see that although, yes, it is narrowly applied in general to things that meet the definition of adaptive evolutionary dynamics, that
That a mind skilled in understanding how adaptive evolution works is then a mind that is actually very well prepared to understand things like economics, for example.
You may never have taken anything in school that involves immunology.
But the fact is, one can directly apply what one understands from the adaptation of creatures to the adaptation of information inside the immune system, and therefore the ability to fend off diseases.
So, you know, the ability to recognize game theory, the difference between a complex system and a complex adaptive system, these are things that apply across our lives.
And so, in any case, it is a tremendous thing to study.
We had many students who arrived because of enthusiasm of other students, even though they didn't particularly think they cared about biology.
And the basic point is, I want something interesting.
And it's like, yes, that's exactly why you should be here.
Yeah, we had a number of students, even ultimately in the advanced programs, who would continue to say, I just don't think I'm good at science.
I never thought that, and I'm not sure that I'm good at science.
It's like, oh, but science then isn't what you think it is.
Again, I use this maybe too much, but it's not the signifiers of science.
It's not the guy wearing the lab coat holding the glassware or running the expensive scientific equipment is there for a scientist.
All too often not.
Quite the opposite.
It's the process of science and the intellectual tools that we use to understand what is true.
Yeah, in fact, I remember from being an undergraduate that there was a particular process that was inflicted on undergraduates in biology because too many of them wanted to go on to be doctors.
And so, you know, effectively the reason to put people through the exercise of learning the Krebs Cycle, and I don't mean knowing that it exists, right, knowing what it does, but the purpose of learning the individual steps in the Krebs Cycle is largely non-existent, right?
But it does discourage a lot of people from applying to medical school because they drop out of biology as a major.
So the point is, this is really not about an upgrade.
It's about the university solving its own problem.
And if you were gonna-- - Well, it's also, it's a test of memorization, but also kind of of compliance.
Right?
Like, okay, you know, how many doctors actually need to know or, you know, professional biologists like research scientists or doctors have to know the molecular details of the Krebs cycle?
Some do, and they can always learn it.
Very, very few do.
And yet, you know, for undergraduate degrees often it was also organic chemistry, right?
Which, you know, is It's vastly fascinating and necessary for those people who are doing the kind of work for which it is necessary.
But the way that it was tending to be taught at least up until very recently, I just don't know at this point, was very much again as a test of memorization.
And it was a flaming hoop you had to jump to.
It's a weed out.
Yeah.
Why would we, as a society, want to compel the vast majority of people that science is boring, uninteresting, and too hard for them, and thus leave them completely at the disposal of authorities who come in wearing effectively their signifiers of scientific authority, Who say, trust us, we know that you can't do the scientific thinking for yourself, so we're going to do it for you.
And we see also that so-called science journalists don't have the skills.
They may have been very finely trained.
A science journalist may well have an undergraduate degree in biochemistry or something.
That doesn't mean that they know how to think scientifically.
And that is the argument that we're making.
Should, you know, everyone who emerges from an actual institution of higher ed with an undergraduate degree, with a bachelor's degree, should understand some version of how to actually think scientifically and understand the power and value of narrative.
And understand how art can transform brains and values.
Right.
And making a complete and exhaustive list, fill in your favorite discipline here, is going to be tough.
But understanding how to think scientifically is very, very different from did you run a gel as an undergraduate and therefore did they give you your rubber stamp?
Right.
The fact is you need to know how some system works.
Something broad enough that if your mind has gotten good at understanding how it works, that when you get to a system you don't know anything about, you can then take the information, which is of course now free, right?
It's all available to us, right?
You can take that information and you can say, alright, well how would I sort this out so I know what it is, right?
How does this system work?
If I know biology, How does weather work, right?
Well, you know, that's a complex system without the adaptation, right?
So what would it be like to just correct what I understand from adaptive evolution, subtract the adaptive part, right?
That is a very easy process compared to bootstrapping from the beginning based on facts.
Yeah.
Is that it for higher ed for right now?
I have a feeling it is a topic we will return to.
Oh, I guess I would say one thing just to finish out the little riff from before.
The thing that Evergreen never did because it was resistant to fixing the model that its founders, you know, it was a prototype.
Yeah.
And nobody ever got around to the 2.0 version.
It was a prototype.
The thing you would do to solve the problem of how do you give faculty freedom in this model with these full-time programs without accumulating a faculty full of dead wood where people Figure out how to hold onto their job, but without doing students much good in the process.
Yep.
Is you would you would throw out the system of tenure and you would build a system in which people who came in, you know, we were when we came into evergreen.
We didn't know how to do the Evergreen job because it's not a job anybody had ever heard of before.
How do you teach in a model where you have complete freedom to teach whatever you want, however you want?
That's something you've got to figure out.
And you've got complete responsibility for the students.
You've never done this before and they're all yours.
100% of their college education for this 10, 20, 30 weeks is yours.
Right.
And I remember how crazy it was to be told by an administrator, here's the assignment.
Describe your ideal course that you want to teach.
You provide a course title and a course description, and then you spend full time for a quarter.
Full time figuring it out.
And it was magic.
First year was amazing, frankly.
But the point is, the way you fix the system is you say, all right, welcome.
You've got a job nobody knows how to do.
Can you figure out how to do something really high quality with all of that freedom?
And you pick a time.
I would say three years is enough to figure out whether somebody can make use of that freedom or is going to squander it.
And the point is, it doesn't matter how much we like you.
At the end of three years, you've either demonstrated that you can do something for students that's totally worth their time, Or you haven't, and you basically, you know, you use selection, right?
You get people on board, try to solve the problem.
If they fail to solve it, you replace them with somebody else, give them the same opportunity, and you accumulate the ones who are good at it, who tend to be the ones who like it.
True.
Obviously that system nominally existed there as it does kind of everywhere that has tenure where you know you get hired to tenure track and then there is an assessment usually after more like five or six years of whether or not you have done sufficiently important work in your research and have sufficiently good teaching and have done your bare minimum of governance such that you will be granted tenure.
What you are arguing is maybe a more selective process where the job itself, having gotten the job, is terrific, but you shouldn't actually assume, as many people do, most institutions, and certainly this is true at Evergreen, will tend to default you into tenure if you did kind of bare minimum stuff.
And especially if you're talking about a model of education that is very different from what other schools do, as we think is, is, you know, just practically necessary in order to do to actually educate undergraduates well, then you would want a truly A truly assessing moment.
And then perhaps, and we've talked about this before and I'm not, you know, we don't have the complete model worked out exactly, but then perhaps not tenure at all, but a system in which you have ever longer contracts as you get, you know, assessed, you know.
Yeah, that's one way.
I mean, my sense is three years in, you knew who was going to make use of the freedom and who didn't.
And so I don't know that you need ever longer contracts because I don't know that people who make good use of the freedom at six years in are going to stop doing it at 12.
But what you need is a system in which... But we see that.
We see that in other schools, you know, because, you know, for people who don't know higher ed at all, the sort of inside baseball is at a normal school.
If you're hired into a tenure-track position, which is to say you are on track to get tenure, you're hired at the assistant professor position, and then if you get tenure, you're upranked to associate professor, and then there's one more leap you can make, generally, to full professor.
And it is both a truism and kind of true.
That all too often the oldest faculty, the faculty who have been around for longest, who actually have the least to lose because they are full professors and they absolutely should have the courage of their convictions to stand up and object to things that are happening that aren't true, are the most likely to just not be doing very innovative work anymore.
Yeah, but I mean, that's also in a different system.
And the thing that makes this applicable to something like Evergreen was that effectively, these jobs were great jobs if freedom was something that you valued, right?
They were not great jobs from the perspective of, you know, how much they paid, right?
And so in a sense, the incentive, you know, a tenured position at a R1 University may not be a very interesting job.
It's a big research university, yeah.
But it may, you know, provide a safe haven for, you know, people who've lost interest in their discipline or whatever.
Right.
So anyway, there's some model to be had, but basically the point is you don't want to accumulate people who are going to squander the freedom, and there's a way to figure out who those people are.
So, you know, 2.0 would look something like that.
Very good.
I think a decent segue from here is actually every week we take in our Q&A a question from our Discord server.
They vote and decide which question they'd like to ask us, and this week's Discord question is actually apropos enough here that I think we're going to do it in the main part of the podcast.
So we got asked this week, Now, from people who are patrons of ours and therefore have access to the Discord server, you've described religion as a Chesterton's fence.
Given the impact of genuine belief, do you think the fence is removed without believing that it is actually true, even if keeping some traditions?
In other words, is it reductionist thinking to just take the traditions without the belief?
If so, how have you resolved this?
That's a great question.
It is an excellent question.
And I think maybe just before jumping into the question, we should say, as we have many times before, what Chesterton Spence is.
So this is the observation by G.K.
Chesterton in 1929, I think.
That if you have two people walking along and they run into a fence and one of them says, I'll get rid of it.
It's my way.
And the other one and all of us should say, ah, you, you cannot, you should not be allowed to get rid of offense until you can tell me what its purpose is.
Simply finding that it is currently in your way is not sufficient reason.
You need to be able to tell me what its function was and what it's supposed to be.
Before we can even consider having the conversation about whether or not it no longer has the function that it was intended to have.
So in Hunter Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, we talk about the very many ways that Chesterton's fence shows up in modernity.
Chesterton's appendix, Chesterton's breast milk, and Chesterton's religions.
Right.
So basically, this is a hedge against the problem of to the extent that you have solved or partially solved a problem, you may not realize that that's what you've done, because the problem is not there in evidence.
And so removing the solution will regenerate the problem, right?
I'm at the moment thinking about defunding the police, right?
Because Chesterton's police.
Because some cops are bastards, right?
Yes, Chesterton's cops is what it is, because the fact is you have no idea how much crime isn't happening because the police do function until you remove them, which we are now seeing all over the place, predictably enough.
Well, some cops are bastards and some protesters are bastards.
Both things are true.
Both things are simultaneously true.
All right, so to the Discord question.
The question really, if I can sum it up, is If religions are compendiums of ancient wisdom, as we argue that they are, prescriptive, and you remove the part where you actually believe in a sky god, let's say, and you just keep the traditions, right?
That thou shalt not this, and treat other people this way.
Have you violated the Chesterton's fence provision or not if you throw out the belief but not the the structures?
And I would say it is very much a mixture right that the fact is there's certain aspects of religion that only work because of people's belief.
Right?
So to the extent that a lot of that thou shalt not stuff comes with a threat.
If thou does, thou ends up in a lake of fire, right?
That's a very strong motivator because the point is who decides if you get in a lake of fire?
Well, it's the sky god who you can't get away from, right?
And so it is built such that a true believer actually is held back in a way that somebody who is not a true believer, sufficient, you know, an atheist for example, might find leeway.
And the two of them in competition, the atheist will out-compete the believer in a market because they will avail themselves of opportunities that are forbidden, etc.
So there's a way, some of the structures absolutely require belief.
And some of the structures are just simply, you know, descriptions of things so that a non-believer who simply enacts the tradition will get the benefits.
So like Lent, for example, right?
If Lent is a mechanism for people to break an addiction, Right, and the idea is everybody knows what it is that's harming you that you can't stop doing and you get around to Lent and you say, all right, I'm going to not do that during Lent, right?
That doesn't require that you believe that a sky god is watching you unless you're going to violate your own rule and imagine that you held to it.
But you know, sober October is Kind of secular Lent like behavior and lots of people who don't believe in this guy got involved themselves in it and succeeding getting through a month So anyway, it's a mix.
It's a mixture of things that do work without belief and don't but the the final thing I'll say and then I'll let you jump in here is That does not mean you can't solve it with a compartmentalization.
Yeah.
Right?
This is kind of where I was going to go, yeah.
Right.
So lots of people, I mean, this is rampant in Judaism, is there are all kinds of Jews who have some kind of a complex relationship with the metaphysical part of the belief structure, you know, to the extent that if you ask them what they believe, what you get back doesn't allow you to figure it out.
Right?
That the point is there's some internal structure that does sort of functionally believe in a deity, but, you know, practical structure that doesn't include it in the analysis of analytical things.
And so there are ways it can be made to hybridize.
Yes.
And I think actually, I'm not sure this works, but as you were talking, I was thinking, when we were talking about higher ed, we're talking about the locus of control and, you know, asking, you know, trying to educate people so that if their locus of control was external, that it came to be internal.
And so people actually had not just the agency, but the motivation to find their true selves and to those true selves be true.
But I wonder about the locus of belief.
I wonder about speaking in this sort of language of locus of control.
If we can't, in a more secular 21st century, to which we all belong, whether or not you understand yourself to have faith in a god or not, That many of us have effectively moved the locus of belief from an external sort of sky god character to actually, I need to honor those morals and principles that I have described for myself.
Because I will not be able to sleep.
I will not be able to live with myself.
I will not be able to face my loved ones and my friends if I don't do what is honorable and good.
And it moves the locus of belief from a totally abstract, never-seen force to, yes, it's still abstract and never-seen inside, but it brings you closer to the thing.
And I'm reminded, and I think we've probably I've told this story on this podcast before, but I'm reminded of us being in Madagascar in 1993, I guess it would have been, right before we started grad school.
This was our after-college trip that our parents were generous enough to pay for us to go on, and instead of going on a tour of Europe, we went to Madagascar.
And at one point at the end of a, gosh, I think it was like a 670 kilometer trip across the southern part of Madagascar, which took, if that number is right, 67 hours, whatever it was, we had an average speed of 10 kilometers an hour for more than two days.
Um, really quite exhausting.
And on that, um, Taxi Bruce ride, we ended up making the acquaintance of, uh, of a young man who invited us to have dinner with his family once we got to our destination, you know, a day or two later after we had managed to clean all of the dust off of ourselves.
Um, and so- I'm not sure I've fully cleaned all the dust off yet.
Yeah, you may.
I was noticing a little bit behind that, that one ear.
Oh, still.
It's a diminishing returns problem.
I'll never quite get there.
Well, forever after, we are a little bit made of Malagasy dust, a little bit red.
Very iron-rich.
But so we were invited to the home of this Malagasy judge and her family, and they spoke some English, and they were fluent in French, and I spoke some French.
We didn't speak any Malagasy.
But in talking with them, we were having a… I also speak some French, but it just doesn't make sense.
That's pretty true, yeah.
We at some point, and I don't remember the run up to this, but they asked us what religion we were.
And I said we didn't have any religion.
And the mood in the room changed immediately.
And I remember it and maybe this is just a sort of a cartoonish memory is that they sort of like backed off of, you know, away from us across the table.
And it became clear that things were now fairly tense and that they weren't actually sure that they could trust us.
And this was maybe an hour or more into the conversation.
We were breaking bread with them.
Well, Malagasy, we were breaking rice with them.
But suddenly, we were very, very different.
And it wasn't just that they didn't know what to make of people who didn't claim a religion.
It was, and this became clear in the conversation that then ensued, that one of them asked us, and I think it may have been the judge herself, said, how is it then that you can be trusted to make the right decisions?
And what, as I remember, what we said in response was, well, We are beholden to our own morality and understand that we would not be able to live with ourselves and also that we have the eyes of each other, that everyone needs to have the eyes of someone in their family.
On them, willing to say, not just willing, but obliged to say, if they are breaking their own sense of values and ethics, actually that thing, that wasn't the right thing to do.
Yes, although, you know, it's funny, that event, I remember it quite vividly, and I have more sympathy with their perspective.
Now, than you did?
Right.
I mean, you know, this is, there is a point to be made on both sides.
There's certainly many, many people like You and me who have replaced the Sky God structure that keeps you in line with some other structure that keeps you in line, right?
And not perfectly for anybody, whether you're a Sky God believer.
I mean, that's what confession is presumably about is people repeatedly screwing up and needing to, you know, wipe the slate clean.
But the point is, I'm not sure that part of what we're seeing in the breakdown of civilization isn't that we crossed some threshold and the number of believers has dropped and so that, you know, the change in the way people monitor their own morality, right?
If the market is sort of taking the place of a guide, right, well then you do, you know, I don't know what exactly the, uh, you do get a kind of hedonistic view.
And, you know, we are now watching, you know, as the police have been defunded, we are watching, there was sort of a grace period where lots of people still continued to behave as they had behaved because they were in the habit of behaving that way.
But people are beginning to discover that certain things aren't being enforced.
And if they're not being enforced, some people will continue not to do them because they should be enforced.
And some people will say, well, if they're not being enforced, Yeah, it was actually the enforcement that was keeping me in line and that's you know, that's that's a problem for for those people and therefore for society that those people exist, but some people do you do require the external belief or force or whatever it is right and you know, so at some level.
I think it's not a bad analogy to say that there is something about the absence of deep belief in a punishing and rewarding God that is like taking the safety off the gun, which is far from discharging the gun.
But the point is, it is one step in that chain.
So, you know, I also think that this is one of these two-way failures of empathy, right?
Where empathy, I won't make the argument here, but empathy basically is you using your own mental architecture to figure out what somebody else is going to think or do by running the data that you have about their situation through your own computer.
And the point is, that works really well if your computer looks like theirs, and it works really badly if it doesn't, and in the case that it looks somewhat like it, It's somewhere in between and I think there's a, there was a part of us that at, how old were we?
Then?
24?
24 years old.
At 24 years old did not really understand what it was like to have lived a life that was so, so thoroughly religiously guided.
Yeah.
And then to encounter people who sounded like atheists.
I will not, I do not.
You don't own that term.
I don't believe in atheists.
But the-- Oh.
Yeah.
The-- such a person has a hard time understanding.
If you know that your behavior is constrained by your belief that a Sky God is not going to be too happy about you doing X, Y, or Z, then you may not understand.
Well then, if I didn't have that person watching me, Then I would presumably do all those things.
How do I know you won't, right?
That is a failure of empathy.
And then our failure to understand that actually they had a point, and maybe we're even seeing that point, you know, expanding across civilization as we do get more secular.
Well, to be fair though, they didn't ask us to leave.
We did come to an understanding that felt sufficient at the time.
And no time to explore all of this today here, but it should just be noted that, okay, so this judge and her family were asking us what religion we had, and we've said multiple times that they were Religious folk, you know, not, you know, not pious in the way of some say, you know, an Italian grandmother.
But, but, you know, what religion would it have been?
They were Christian, the Christian, the Christians having shown up in Madagascar sometime.
Presumably during the French colonial period, sometime in the, I don't actually know exactly when, but either late 19th or more likely early mid 20th century.
And Christianity largely replaced the traditional animist beliefs that are still in evidence.
You still have, for instance, Turning of the Bones ceremonies, which I was lucky enough to attend one of these.
They're caught up.
which the ancestors are disinterred on a regular basis and talked to, depending on which tribe it is.
- They're caught up, they're brought up to speed.
- They're brought up to speed on what's happened.
And as I've noted elsewhere, they're brought up to speed on births and marriages and the harvest, and they're probably not brought up to speed explicitly on who's died because presumably the ancestors already know that.
- Yeah.
- Yeah, they're hanging out with the other people who've died since last they spoke.
But anyway, there's still animus traditions in many regards in evidence across all of Madagascar, but most people now call themselves Christians, and certainly this family was Christian.
All right.
Is that it?
I think that's it.
All right.
We have, we've been going already for over an hour.
We have a few more things that we're going to talk about.
And I'm wondering, I definitely want to get to number seven here, but can you, can you see, you want to put on your glasses and just see?
I need binoculars actually at this distance.
Um, if you want to skip either of the, you know, the apologies or the... Let's hold six off for next week.
Okay, okay.
So let's talk just a little bit about apologies.
This was prompted by a conversation that you and I Had and it's something that we have again said multiple times that you know apologies are Necessary they are Honorable and necessary when you have done wrong you owe an apology and What that means is that the denigration of apology to being someone that can be prompted even when you haven't done wrong?
actually reduces the efficacy of apology.
And if you're willing to denigrate apology this way, that suggests that you don't actually believe that apology itself is a value. - So it did not occur to me as we were thinking about this segment, but it now occurs to me, the very first assignment that I gave in my very first Evergreen course was to have students explain why apology matters.
Excellent.
Why should simply vibrating air molecules and saying you're sorry make any difference to anyone, right?
So what kinds of conversations emerged from that or what did you have in your head?
What's the answer?
Is this going to be on the test?
No, we'll not be on the test, because there isn't going to be a test.
Well, first of all, it was a mental revolution for most of these students to face a question like that, because they weren't familiar with the style of question, right?
Apology is something that we all experience at some level, and the question of why it works, and therefore, what does work even mean?
And the answer is, well, If I am feeling some way towards you, and you violate some agreement that is presumably unstated between us, and then you apologize to me for doing so, then that changes how I feel about you.
You know, the violation changes how I feel about you, and then the apology restores how I feel about you.
I mean, and of course more than that.
If you feel that I've wronged you, and I don't think I've wronged you, and maybe I don't even know that you feel that I've wronged you, either you simmer and seethe and it never comes up and probably we just, well, in our case it would get resolved.
But say we didn't know each other that well, maybe the friendship dissolves over it because It's this unresolved thing.
Hopefully, more likely, at some point at the point that, you know, the person who may or may not have wronged the other person is approached by the person who thinks they've been wronged and says, you know, this is just this is weighing on me.
I can't, I can't get over it.
I really think that that thing that you did, you know, affected me this way negatively, and you shouldn't have done it and you owe me an apology.
And If, if, you know, one of at least two things then happens, you know, the person who did or did not wrong the other person says, Oh my God, I didn't see it that way.
I, you're right, or let me think on it for a little while they come back say you're right, I didn't see it that way I didn't know I didn't know that other thing or I was just blind to the effects that I was having.
That's one outcome.
Another outcome is, no, actually, here's how I understand the world that makes what I did acceptable or right, and maybe there's nuance there and says, yeah, I could have done it this way, but I actually think the way that I did do it is appropriate.
Can we talk about whether or not you still think that I owe you an apology?
Simply going like we agree to disagree and going your separate ways Isn't nearly as effective because more often than not agree to disagree is oh my god That person is just unable to see reason and I hope I don't end up in another situation like them again All right, so we're going to come back to agree to disagree.
I would point out there's some other outcomes here that begin to tell you the answer to this question.
One is somebody delivers an apology that isn't an apology, one that you believe is not heartfelt or that comes with a structure, I'm sorry you feel that way.
Well, you can be sorry you feel that way without being sorry that you acted The way you did.
Exactly.
Right?
And so if you begin to get the idea that... I'm so sorry your brain looks the way it does.
I'm sorry you're forcing me to have this conversation with you, right?
That's not a good apology.
But then there's this other really interesting case where the person delivers what appears to be a genuine apology and then makes the same error again.
Maybe they're just in the habit of behaving this way and doing it again.
And so And they need to lose the habit.
They need to learn how not to be in the habit.
That's a possibility, right?
Or maybe they're not a trustworthy person to interact with and so then the point is, well, I'm not going to continue a relationship with somebody who keeps harming me in the same way and then apologizing and it doesn't mean anything, right?
So anyway, the basic point is what you really get here is obvious negotiation.
Yes.
Right?
It is negotiation.
Now why would it be negotiation?
Because if I, let's say that I, I don't know, I leave you stranded somewhere for an hour, right?
And there's not a really good reason, right?
I've just been careless.
And it's like, okay, do I feel the hour that I just cost you, right?
Maybe I do feel it, right?
I'm really sorry I did that.
But then it doesn't change the behavior.
You're welcome.
But then it doesn't change the behavior that causes it.
And I do it to you again and again, right?
The point is, actually... At some point I don't let you take the car and drive away from me.
Right.
Anymore.
Like I'm not going to accept being stranded.
But here's the thing.
When I apologize, if I've done it well, right?
Then you know that I know what I did, which then puts an extra responsibility on me not to do it again, because you know I know.
It's not like this is in my own blind spot.
We've got it promoted to consciousness, right?
And yet I still do it.
That means I don't really care that much, right?
And so...
Or it's going to take more time than is good for, you know, me or you, for you to figure it out.
But, you know, it's quite possible.
There's something deeply embedded enough in the habits, in the way of tracking time, for instance.
Right.
And actually, we do have this.
There's stuff about me that you and I both agree ought to change, but you and I also both know it's not under my control.
And it's kind of like that.
Like, you know, you don't leave me stranded like that.
But, you know, there is a sort of a like, Oh my god, again with the not having kept track of time, and here I thought we had agreed to something.
But it's not that you don't value my time, and it's not that you misunderstand that not valuing my time is okay.
It's an actual, you know, more slowly than either of us would like, but, you know, sort of changing assessment of, oh, okay, actually there are other characters, other people involved here, and they are also living on the same timeline that I am.
Okay.
So, what I believe the answer to the question is and was, and what the discussion over several days actually emerged into, was… You were talking now about your classroom and the apology assignment.
Classroom.
And still, it was one of the most marvelous classrooms full of eclectic students who signed up for the craziest description I could come up with.
This is your first evergreen program ever.
This would have been like in the fall of 2003 or something.
Yeah, it was called Adaptation.
I'm still in touch with several of the people from that, and we had an extraordinarily good time, even though I did not know what I was doing.
I mean, that's part of what contributes to it.
Yeah, it was great.
It was very seat of the pants, but it worked well.
But anyway, the point is...
Apology is a discussion of debt, right?
It is also a promotion of the costly behavior to consciousness, which increases the chances of being able to correct the behavior going forward and increases the chances that both parties will be able to see if somebody is simply just not, as you say, valuing someone else's time, for example.
So, the point is, an apology, a good one, Is both a promise not to do it again, or to exert the proper effort to prevent doing it again, and an IOU, right?
Why does it make a difference that somebody apologizes to you?
Because at the point that I say, okay, I just cost you an hour, right?
Am I going to give you a hard time over a half an hour somewhere else?
No.
In fact, what I've said is that my behavior resulted in you losing an hour that you couldn't do anything with.
Well, and this is part of why, especially in romantic bonds, apologies, at least from men to women, often are accompanied by gifts, right?
The IOU nature of it is, you know, I know that I cannot If it's a legitimate apology, if it's a warranted and legitimate apology, I know that I cannot actually give you the thing back by which I wronged you, but here's some flowers, or a necklace, or whatever it is.
Yeah, it could be a symbolic gift or it could be a meaningful gift.
But I think actually the place to take this is in a complex relationship, whatever kind of relationship it is.
Sibling, spousal, whatever.
that debt does not exist in isolation, right?
- Yes.
- So the point is it doesn't have to be-- - The flowers don't actually shut the door on the IOU.
- They don't shut the door on the IOU.
They're an advertisement that I recognize I screwed up, for example.
So the point is these relationships are complex and we don't get the same, We're not always paid back in kind, but in order for the relationship to be durable, you have to feel that it is on balance better to be in it than out of it, right?
And so it may be that I never fix my not linear relationship with time and that that will have Even the producer is snickering now.
Even the producer is snickering because he's seen it too.
But the point is, that is a cost that exists in the relationship.
I am aware of an obligation to minimize it.
And the net effect is that that cost doesn't overwhelm the benefits.
So, anyway, the point is, why does an apology, why does simply saying something to somebody make any difference?
Well, it doesn't automatically.
There has to be reason to think the person means it, there has to be agreement over what it is that is being apologized for, and there has to be evidence that actually you take the debt seriously.
If those things accrue, then the point is actually, of course it makes a difference, because an I.O.U.
from somebody, I mean, you know, why does a piece of paper make a difference when somebody says, I owe you a thousand bucks?
Well, because it's a legal contract.
Because it holds some fraction of the value, a large fraction of the value of a thousand bucks, because you can collect on it.
And so it is that.
It is that style of object.
And anyway, we had a reason to be talking about Apology, but the idea that there is a very deep Yeah, I don't know.
It's really up to you.
We've spent a lot of time on this now, whether or not you want to talk about the context in which this was showing up.
ever thinking, well, why does that work and how does it work and what kind of object is it?
Right.
Yeah.
I don't know.
It's really up to you.
You know, we're, we're, we're, we've spent a lot of time on this now.
I, whether or not you want to talk about the context in which this was showing up, you know, if it were my choice, I would just move on to giraffes.
Yeah, let's go to giraffes.
I don't frankly remember the context.
Okay, excellent.
Then I won't force you to present it.
Finally, just briefly, last week we talked about Drobs, and we explained why we pronounce it that way, which is to say that a former student and friend taught us that that was in fact the more enjoyable way to pronounce it, and the Drobs themselves don't seem to mind.
It's hard to tell with Drobs.
I have found this too.
So last week we talked about zoos, I think Dallas Zoo maybe in particular, having said they were going to vaccinate their animals and then having several giraffes die.
Possibly they said of encephalomyocarditis, which seems suspicious to us.
Suspicious is like possible vaccine A's, adverse events.
But this was brought to my attention this week.
Can you, Zach, share my screen?
Let's try.
Oh, you are.
Oh, except it's frozen.
You know, that's fine.
Oh, wait, it's a little frozen.
No, it's still frozen.
Let's just, let's give my screen back so I can.
Yep.
We are seat of our pants here.
Yeah, but we got this beautiful art behind us.
So Newsweek, as you saw there briefly, ran a article on the 9th of November called Fact Check, colon, did Dallas Zoo giraffes die after COVID vaccine?
And the claim in the story is that the zoo says, the zoo's claims, they haven't even received the vaccines for their animals yet, much less vaccinated any of them.
So if this is true, this Newsweek fact check story, that obviously means that the animals didn't die of vaccine adverse events because they haven't even been vaccinated yet.
So, A, we wanted to come back and say, this is the newest information that we have here, but we also wanted to use this as a moment to say, okay, this is an article that is literally called fact check, fact check, colon.
And, you know, obviously everyone at this point should be suspect of anything called fact checking.
Recall that the CNN article that we were reading from last week suggested, quote, that it suspected the deaths of Jesse and Augie, those are the giraffes, it suspected the deaths of Jesse and Augie could be connected but had yet to establish definitive proof.
Okay, the Newsweek article this week, the fact check says, quote, 19-year-old giraffe Augie died on October 22nd with age-related health issues leading to liver failure.
And on October 29th, 14-year-old giraffe Jesse died just days after showing signs of an illness.
The blood test showed he had, quote, abnormal liver enzymes.
So the Fact Check Newsweek article makes no explicit mention of a possible connection between the two deaths, nor does it say that the zoo had considered that, but now really feels that the deaths have no connection to one another, which makes it, at best, an incomplete fact check, and at worst, of course, not, in fact, about checking facts at all.
Yeah, and I would say, if you stand in our shoes and you look at all of the fact checks, including some that have been pointed at us, that were clear nonsense, you know that something has borrowed the idea of fact and is now applying that concept to things that are not facts.
In fact, it is applying them to things that are, in many cases, the inverse of facts.
And that is, of course, a dire breach of the obligation of those in a position to check facts with the rest of us.
And we see this in Wikipedia, which now routinely slanders people, including me.
Including both of us now.
Are you being slandered too?
I believe so.
I haven't gone back and looked, but that's what I hear.
Well, obviously, this is a very important mechanism, you know, the greatest encyclopedia that has ever existed.
Sure was.
And now it is a political tool.
Yep.
Fact checks are now political tools.
The idea of a public health authority that claims things are safe and effective when evidence suggests that we cannot claim they are safe, even a conservative understanding of the term safe would not allow it to be applied to some things it is currently applied to.
These are abuses.
Of mechanisms we absolutely need, and it's as if we have forgotten the boy who cried wolf principle, right?
There are certain things you do not violate, because having violated them, you will cause a disaster.
And the fact checkers are now causing this disaster.
So is it possible that these giraffes, giraubs, died having not been vaccinated for COVID?
Of course it's possible.
Do I have any confidence that that's what happened, based on the fact that fact-checkers are now wagging their fingers at those who jumped at this story?
I have no idea, right?
It could be anything.
We've seen all kinds of accounting fraud in the context of COVID and vaccines, so we don't know what this is.
Basically, we have to be agnostic.
I think so.
And I don't know, Zach, you could even just show the brief screen here.
I don't know if I'll be able to scroll, but my very first post on natural selections sub-stack was, fact-checkers aren't scientists, which takes on exactly this question and indeed points out some official fact-checks that have been done.
Yeah, it's not scrolling.
Um, with regard to you, and I think it was Dr. Robert Malone as well, that were, you know, patently false.
And, you know, when, when they are actually discovered, when fact checks are actually discovered to be accurate, they don't, they sometimes don't even change the fact checks.
They do, um, they just sort of quietly, um, you know, quietly make a change and maybe no one ever sees it.
But, um, the fact check themselves are what get big play.
And the fact is, Just as we were talking about, just maybe to bring it full circle, higher education is failing almost everyone at this point.
Students, faculty, even administrators, right?
Just because there are too many administrators doesn't mean that most people who go into college higher administration don't want to be doing a good job and aren't interested in actually educating people and helping the best research be done in the world.
The fact that most people are graduating from college without an understanding of what science is and are... Oh, and so we're now frozen.
Okay.
Maybe give me our regular screen back.
Okay.
The fact is that most people who are doing the fact-checking Right.
And, you know, there's one level at which the question is, are they capable of fact-checking?
to decide what is and is not true. - Right, and you know, there's one level at which the question is are they capable of fact-checking?
And then there's another question about whether they are attempting fact-checking or simply borrowing that voice that we follow the sign that borrows, you know, the garb of scientists in order to sell a marketing campaign.
Now I would suggest, I want to think about this, but personally speaking, I'm wondering if either well-intentioned or not well-intentioned fact-checkers, if you might think of them as locusts of control, It's good.
I like that.
They're rockets of control.
Oh boy.
Yeah.
Yep.
Mm-hmm.
There it is.
There it is.
Yes.
Well, I'm not going to put my screen back in a place where I can read it for people.
It's definitely going to say to the world.
But we're about ready to go.
We are too.
We need to fill a little bit of time.
Yes.
Well, so we knew that- It's not sending anymore.
Okay.
Sorry, it's probably sounds very incoherent.
I'm just having set glitches.
But look at the fancy art.
I can't say.
No, so we are going to say now, and hopefully by the time we are almost, almost?
By the time you can see us again, we will be able to sign out.
There we are!
Hi guys.
Hi guys.
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And, um, what else?
Anything else?
I think we've done it.
I think we've done it.
Alright, I also think we've done it.
So, until next time, which may be 15 minutes from now and maybe 6 days from now, depending, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
