#129: Rancid Frosting on a Rotten Cupcake (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
View on Odysee: https://odysee.com/evolens129:10c420bcb2df7ae0e97adfd3d68a3475a554c70e View on Spotify (With video): ***** In this 129th 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. This week, we discuss whether we might be in a dark age—an era in which “all of our structures of knowledge are plagued by errors, at all levels, from the trivial to the profo...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 12900.
Hard to believe it is that many live streams, but you know, the numbers don't lie.
I mean, they can be made to lie, but we wouldn't have done that.
And here we are.
So here we are.
You are Brett Weinstein, Heather Hine coming to you as we so often do on Saturdays.
Yes, Dr. Brett Weinstein, Dr. Heather Hine.
It is June 3rd or 4th?
4th.
It is the 4th of June, of course.
Everybody knows that.
And yeah, I came up with a really, really funny joke to set the live stream in motion this morning.
Unfortunately, I came up with it in the shower and state-dependent learning being what it is, I don't remember what it was.
It was funny, you'll have to trust me on that though.
It was good and just getting back into the shower to remember it would not have been worth the time.
No, I don't think so.
Yeah, I won't dwell on it though.
No, I wouldn't.
I've let it go already.
Have you?
Mostly.
It's not totally evident.
Today we are going to talk about a number of broad issues about where we find ourselves in society.
Is it good where we find ourselves?
There are rays of hope.
There's a hopeful note or two in here, you're right about that.
There are hopeful notes, and the fact is that what we are trying to do is speak truth where we find it, as we see it, come what may.
Of course, this is part of why we have found ourselves on the wrong end of certain sticks wielded by certain authorities, as they would prefer that we not speak certain truths.
Truths or investigate certain ideas, but the fact that our audience continues to grow, despite what some platforms may suggest about the numbers, suggests that there are an awful lot of people out there who are, in fact, not buying into the idea that all you have to do to know what's going on is let the authorities tell you.
So, we're going to investigate a number of ideas.
Today, including a return to some concepts that you have talked about before, including the sort of growing epidemic of sophistry, as it were.
How about we go there?
In light of this movie that came out this week that neither of us have seen, but it's a lot of people talking about it, and we've watched the clips, the What is a Woman movie that Matt Walsh, I think, directed, starred in, that's It's on the Daily Wire platform, and it asks a question of our time.
What is a woman?
Which has a really simple answer, and which many, many, many people seem to be refusing to engage with that simplicity, because it doesn't serve them in their sophistry.
In their sophistry.
Which they do not recognize as such, presumably.
But before that, we will spend some time talking about whether or not, for instance, we find ourselves in a dark age, as has been proposed by one excellent clear-headed thinker.
First, however, some logistics.
In the last week, we have had both the French and the Spanish editions of Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century come out.
Here is, in fact, we haven't received the Spanish one yet, but here's the Here's the… I can't get that flat with the camera.
Here's the French version.
I'm not going to do it.
I was going to say it in French.
You were going to try to pronounce it, weren't you?
Yeah, but then I actually forgot to look up how you say 21st.
I don't remember how you say first.
I was going to say 21 century in French, and that's just bad, so that's my excuse for not trying to say… I'm like, I did.
Wander Gatherer, which we had a dear friend of ours and former student of ours who is, I don't think she's a native French speaker, but her mother is, and so she's completely bilingual.
I don't think it's her first language exactly, but she's completely fluent in French, and she said it for us.
We got to spend some time with her this week, and she said it for us over and over and over again, and still I thought, My tongue just doesn't want to do that.
But anyway, here it is.
Now that I think about it, we should have had her record it.
How did we miss that opportunity?
Yeah, how did we miss that?
Anyway, we're actually going to be recording, we will be speaking in English, but recording a lot of hours of Spanish language interviews that will be translated this week.
We hear from a lot of people in Spanish-speaking countries, for whom Spanish is their first language, who have been waiting for the Spanish edition of the book, and here it comes.
It's available now.
Okay, if you're watching, actually I've been told that Odyssey is not working again this week, so if you're watching on YouTube, keep watching on YouTube.
If this is later and you're watching on Spotify or you're listening, great, that works too.
With regard to products, we haven't put out any new products in a while.
We've got a cool new shirt coming.
It's not available just yet, but next week or the week after.
I think they're going to like it.
I think they are too.
So you can look at some of our existing merchandise at store.darkhorsepodcast.org and look forward to something new soon.
At Natural Selections this week, my sub stack, I woke.
I wrote about some of the downstream effects of some things, including woke ideology and also homelessness policy in many West Coast and other, but especially West Coast cities.
So go there.
That seems to have been well received.
Finally, with regard to logistics before we embark on the main part of the podcast, we are, as you all know, supported by our audience.
We appreciate you subscribing to the channel, to both this channel and to the Clips channel, liking and sharing there on Odyssey or YouTube or Spotify.
And we have, for instance, a new clip out today that came out of our private monthly Q&A this month, which you can access on my Patreon.
We encourage you to join either of our Patreons.
Brett had a great conversation this morning on his.
And also, the main podcast for a while now, and maybe forever, we'll have in addition to our live streams, another episode with Brett.
And a guest this week that just came out this week was with Neil Oliver.
I haven't listened to all of it, but the parts that I have listened to so far are just fabulous.
And, you know, the two of you were amazing.
And in combination, in conversation, it's terrific.
Yeah, it was quite a good conversation.
Really enjoyed it.
The feedback on it has been stellar.
People have really enjoyed hearing the two of us chat.
And I will say that there was at least one sort of important new idea, for me at least, dropped in there, which Neil and I have We've been kind of pursuing a little bit farther back channel since the thing emerged.
So anyway, there will be another conversation at some point and we will further pursue the question of whether or not the force that seeks to corral us has become shy of what Neil calls the wet work.
...involved in the tyrannies of the 20th century or whether it may have moved into a new phase.
Anyway, I think it's a really important question.
So if that all seems cryptic to you, check out this episode.
Well, remotely applied tyranny is certainly easier, probably cheaper, and all less gory than close-up.
Yeah, and it's easier to rationalize.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay, so you can, you know what, excuse me, just a reminder that last summer YouTube demonetized us and we're still demonetized, our channels are live, but we make no money through YouTube and that was a substantial source of our income.
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Okay.
We are going to start by sharing some bits from an essay that our friend Alexandros Marinos shared with us and a few other friends this morning, which both of us were both
Amazed by, for how much it resonates with things we have thought, and also, I speak only for myself because we haven't actually talked about much more than that, the way that the author puts some things together that we have thought and puts some things together in some new ways.
So, if you will share my screen here for a bit, Zach.
This is a... Oh.
Yeah, you don't have the power to share my screen yet, in part because there's a cat's tail between the cable and the... Wow.
We'll just see if I've pinned the cat in place here.
Can you share my screen now, Zach?
Okay, well, I will... I will begin... Okay.
So this is by a man named Steve Patterson.
It's on his site and published in about a year ago, a little less than a year ago, on June 25th, 2021.
In which he posits that we are, in fact, and have been, not that we are now entering, but that we have been in a dark age.
And although he doesn't explore it in this essay, in part one, which is so far the only part yet published, but that we actually may be seeing signs that we could be emerging from that dark age, which is Rather hopeful, I'm not sure.
I'd like to see the evidence for that laid out as clearly as he's laid out the evidence for the idea that we are actually in a dark age now.
But let me just, and you can keep on my screen, although that didn't work.
Take off my screen for a moment.
I think when we plugged in, everything got Strangified on my screen, so now you can share my screen again.
Here's just a PDF of the same essay, the very same essay, and we'll of course link to this in the show notes as we always do.
I just want to share a few bits and have us talk about the bits that I'm sharing from this.
Darkness everywhere, Patterson writes.
And again, the thesis is we are in a dark age, and we have been, in fact, since early in the 20th century.
since early in the 20th century.
He says, "By a dark age, I do not mean that all modern beliefs are false.
The earth is indeed round.
Indeed, I mean that all of our structures of knowledge are plagued by errors at all levels, from the trivial to the profound, periphery to the fundamental.
Nothing that you've been taught can be believed because you were taught it.
Nothing can be believed because others believe it.
No idea is trustworthy because it's written in a textbook.
And this will resonate with many of our viewers, of course.
This is what it looks like, this is what it feels like in the modern era to say you can't trust an authority on the basis that they are an authority.
And every authority absolutely must earn your trust before they warrant being let into your brain, frankly.
And of course that's a dicey business because how is it that you let someone into your brain in order to figure out if you do in fact trust them without having let them in where they can perhaps muck things up and muddle about with how you're thinking.
So, there are a number of things.
Obviously, you and I were both struck by this essay.
I think we do need to say, and I've now confirmed with him.
I didn't know who this person was until I'd read this essay, and then I reached out to him and confirmed that, in fact, there is a reference in there.
He mentions the scientist who discovers there's a problem with lab rats.
I believe he's referring to me.
I'm pretty sure that's right, but he is at least aware of us, and so some of this may not be totally independent.
But there is a A fact here, which is that we have converged on an understanding, and this is a strongly suggested piece of evidence, right?
The idea that multiple people starting in different places arrive at the same conclusion, which is that, you know, we have a system in which our mechanism for figuring out what is true is so broadly untrustworthy That in fact you cannot look at a textbook and say this is generally right.
Right.
Now of course this puts you, he doesn't mention in this essay, but this of course puts you in a familiar predicament because Descartes was of course troubled by the fact that almost everything Descartes.
Rene Descartes.
Rene Descartes.
I heard Dick Hart.
Dick Hart.
Who is this?
I don't know who we're talking about.
Dick Gephardt was in a totally different predicament, but Descartes.
Rene Descartes was in a predicament.
He was in a predicament because he recognized that almost everything he knew he did not know directly, and that that raised the possibility that a lot of it just simply wasn't right.
Now, of course, you can absolutely paralyze yourself with that recognition.
The question is, what do you do?
How much do you accept Because people basically generally believe it and how much are you skeptical of things that people generally believe because sometimes those things are dead wrong.
There's a kind of an art form to figuring out how to separate the wheat from the chaff.
And especially in the modern era when there is so much to know, when no human being could possibly know all of the things that some human beings know, you have to decide either to be completely unaware of a huge, huge fraction of what other human beings talk about, and we all do that to some degree, and you have to figure out to some degree who is it that you're going to outsource your thinking to on X topic.
And we'll get here.
I'm going to just quickly walk through, as we talk, each of his six main points, each of his six main lines of evidence for why he thinks we're in a dark age now.
And part of what we're seeing is that people have outsourced, frankly, science.
So many people decided, for a lot of reasons, many of which we've talked about on air, that, oh, I don't do science.
I'm not mathy.
I don't do that sort of thing.
And part of that is because some of our people really aren't that good at it.
It's not what they're drawn to, but a lot of it is about a really It's a crappy early educational system which teaches science badly, which teaches math badly, and so confirms for people that they're not good at things which they certainly could have been good at and actually are obliged to at least be literate in.
I've made the point on Dark Horse before that being illiterate is not tolerated in coastal intelligentsia circles, whereas being innumerate is actually almost a badge of honor.
You can talk about being math-phobic or innumerate and have people say, well, of course, aren't we all?
And you certainly wouldn't be able to say that about your ability to read a newspaper article.
But if you acknowledge that actually you just kind of gloss over even the really basic math presented in newspaper articles, that explains in part why even the really basic math presented in newspaper articles is so often bad and wrong because no one seems to be checking it.
Yeah, like literally no one is checking it well enough for it to get caught before, you know, it emerges in public.
Just the most jaw-dropping, you know, errors, orders of magnitude off, and transparently so, for example.
But, so there are a number of things.
One, to notice that we are in some kind of a dark age is like step one.
Step two is to figure out what to do about it, right?
How, you know, are you going to allow your thinking process to just be completely ground to a halt by the fact that you can't trust things?
Or are you going to figure out, you know, which ice is thick enough for you to put your weight on and which ice isn't?
And, you know, so there are little tricks like there are features of a thought process.
If you're trying to make headway on a difficult problem, sometimes there's A something that you have to believe in order to make progress downstream that you know is suspect.
And the question is, how do you allow that placeholder belief to exist?
While not compromising everything that you build on top of it, and so you sort of have to maintain an awareness of what rests on the truth of this thing, which I suspect probably isn't quite true, and to what extent do, you know, if it is refined and it turns out to be sort of 80% of the way there, what falls apart of what you've just done because some assumption was off by a substantial amount?
Yeah, it requires a sort of a probabilistic kind of thinking about decision trees, including intellectual decision trees, wherein does the bow, does the limb that you climb out on in order to explore some idea, If it were an actual tree, it would need to absolutely 100% bear your weight.
And if it is completely rotten, it will fall immediately, and hopefully that will be revealed too in the metaphorical space of ideas.
But what about if it's not exactly what you think it is, and if you start jumping up and down on it, it would start to crack, but it's good enough for now?
What are the things that you are going to try to explore, I guess, downstream?
I don't want to say upstream here, but downstream of that decision to go out on that limb.
Is contingent on you being on exactly that limb, and what isn't?
This is complexity space.
This is hard, and it's impossible to do perfectly.
Well, and that's the thing, it doesn't have to be perfect.
Right.
But actually it occurs to me, now that we're talking about it, that when done correctly, meta-analysis is a formalization of this process.
You can't do meta-analysis on informal topics.
It has to be, you know, it's basically a way of compiling data that was collected in different ways into a synthetic analysis.
But the point is, in a meta-analysis, If you discover that one of the studies in question was either badly done, right, that there's some terrible flaw in it or that it wasn't done at all and it's a fraud, then the point is it isn't that, well, that analysis was inside of your meta-analysis, your meta-analysis is garbage.
The answer is, okay, what if we turn that one to zero and what happens to the remainder of the analysis?
Because you know exactly how contingent the conclusion was on any given piece of evidence.
So the question is, how do you take that line of logic and apply it to things that are not algorithmic, right?
How do you figure out what's true in a world of uncertain data that you can't check or uncertain evidence?
I'm going to try to stop talking about data because it's really evidence that matters.
But I will say, so I think I said some weeks ago that I had occasion to go back to my own Twitter feed and search it for the term dark age.
And that I found that I had been tweeting about a dark age since 2009 when I signed up for Twitter.
And I know that I was talking about it before then, but at least I can go back that far and say, you know, not a new thought.
The idea that the dark age might go back to early in the 20th century, I hadn't thought that.
That's a new idea for me as well, although it's consistent with a lot of what we have been talking about with regard to the financial model of the modern university and of science in particular, playing into people's worst instincts around who to trust and where the incentives are.
Yes, and the incentives, not only do they pollute everything that comes out of that structure so that it is suspect, but they also train the people who might otherwise have become high quality scientists to become the inverse, right?
By putting them through a sales training program, You take them out of the mind frame of falsification.
And so at the at the conference in Bath, one of the things that I said that apparently resonated with people was just for people who aren't paying as close attention, right?
So I went to this conference in Bath, which was a lot of COVID dissidents was the central sort of theme of the conference.
And I was hosting a panel on the question of How do we recapture science?
And my contention was, you can't, because even if you fixed all of the incentives so that it would work, there aren't enough people in it who remember how to do it, such that if, you know, if you fixed it and rebooted it, it wouldn't run.
You have to rebuild it, right?
And that is, you know, it's just happenstance, I guess.
But it resonates very well with this essay in the sense that Yes, the system that is supposed to figure out what's true has been diverted into some other activity, and now it's not like nobody knows how to do it, but the system is mostly a Potemkin village of science.
It's not the real thing.
Yeah, so Patterson I think is arguing, although I don't think he explicitly does it here, that the failure of academia in concert, in synchronicity with the rise of academia as producing what the world is supposed to regard as the people who are authorities on all the subjects.
...is the combination that has taken us down.
And so certainly in science, we see this.
You need what's called a terminal degree.
You need a PhD or an MD, depending, in order to have standing in science or medicine by which you then are allowed to say things in many circles.
And this is a style of thinking about scientific thinking and medical thinking that we have been arguing against since before we ourselves had PhDs.
And of course, it is easier for people with the terminal degrees that are required by the system to say, actually, that's a terrible metric.
And it's a terrible metric because of all of the ways that the system is actually cannibalizing people, slotting people into highly specialist regimes.
Out of which they cannot see.
And once there, it becomes both difficult to think, and it becomes difficult to choose to go outside, because now their entire livelihoods depend on being in this path, in this canal, to use the developmental term, canalized.
So let's just share a little bit more here.
Sure.
You may share my screen if you like, Zach.
Why did this happen?
Patterson asks, and he has six ideas, and I'm going to show you the six and read a couple of bits from a couple of them.
First, he argues, intellectuals have greatly underestimated the complexity of the world.
Two, specialization has made people stupid.
And that maybe wouldn't have been the word I would have chosen there, but maybe it would have been.
And certainly in some cases that's true.
And here's one of the specific things that he argues under that second of six reasons, ways that he thinks that we have arrived at a dark age in modern times.
Specialization fractures knowledge into many different pieces, and in our present dark age, almost nobody has tried to put the pieces back together.
Contrary to popular opinion, it does not take specialized knowledge or training to comment on the big picture or see conceptual errors within a discipline.
In fact, a lack of training can be an advantage for seeing things from a fresh perspective.
The greatest blind spots of specialists are caused by the uniformity of their formal education.
The balance between generalists and specialists is mirrored by the balance between experimenters and theorists.
The 20th century had an enormous lack of competent theorists, who are often considered unnecessary or too philosophical.
Theorists, like generalists, are able to synthesize knowledge into a coherent picture and are absolutely essential for putting fractured pieces of knowledge back together.
Now, this is completely simpatico with many of the themes that we have had in our lives, been exploring since we were undergraduates actually.
But one of them in particular, just to bring the like, okay, but how does that operationalize?
How does that work in real time?
Is that science relying on funding from external agencies, the three-letter agencies like NIH and NSF and DOD, ...means that the scientists, and therefore their employers, which is mostly the universities, that is, you know, higher ed, the institutions, academia writ large, prefer more expensive science to less expensive science.
And of course, we would all be better in a system where the more cheaply you can answer a question, the better off you are, right?
But that is the opposite of the system we have now.
We have a system where the incentives run exactly the opposite of that.
And theorists, people who put fractured pieces back together, as is sort of what we do on Dark Horse, but is very much what Brett does in life and has done as a scientist, both in your graduate work and in ensuing work.
in the many years since then, doesn't take very much money to do.
It's about thinking.
It's about accessing people's ideas and people's brains and thinking about how they go together.
It generally doesn't take instrumentation and chemical reagents.
In modern times, you do need a laptop.
You need a laptop.
You need a laptop, but at some level, so do we all, right?
So, it is in some ways and often the cheapest kind of science to do.
And this is also true, incidentally, of much of field science, which also has ways into meaning that the reductionist world of lab science doesn't and has also been undervalued by the move towards science being privileged based on how expensive it is, which again is backwards from how it should be.
So the idea that theorists are too philosophical, I'm reminded of lots of conversations that we've had over the years with various people who were confused on this front.
But one of them is I once said to a historian who was dismissive of the ability or value of scientists and science to have anything useful to say about history.
And And this struck me as absurd, in part because evolution, like geology, is explicitly an historical science, right?
And so I said, well, actually, let's talk about all of the ways in which trying to reconstruct, trying to understand what happened in human history, and trying to reconstruct what happened in like parrot history, or rock history, Actually uses many of the same tools, many of the same philosophical underpinnings around, for instance, history happened once, you can't ever go back and change that history.
But what we understand about what is true may change over time, will change over time, as we hopefully get a better and better understanding of what actually happened.
Our understanding comes closer and closer, comes to be a closer and closer match for actual reality as it happened.
But will we ever get to 100% match with reality?
Maybe not.
Will we ever know if we've gotten there?
How would we, right?
Our tools are ways to get closer and closer, and some of the assessment tools are ways to understand if we've gotten there or not, but it will never be perfect.
She thought this was hilarious, honestly, this historian.
And when I pointed out that all of us in the academy have doctors of philosophy, that's what a PhD is, a doctor of philosophy,
And for me, that points out that at least at some point in relatively recent history, it has been understood that what all of us are supposed to be doing is thinking first about the epistemology, about how it is that we're making claims within our various fields of truth, and what those claims are based on, and whether or not they're justified.
Is that actually what most modern people with PhDs are doing?
Of course not.
But that's the shame and the degradation of modern science and history and literature and all of the other fields.
That is not about the fact that philosophy doesn't belong there in the first place.
I want to introduce a concept that I think is missing from this discussion, okay?
The problem is that by dividing things between empirical science, reductionism, and theory, the problem is that theory exists at every level, right?
Even in an experiment, there is the hypothesis that should be motivating your experiment, and then there's the implication of what you find for that hypothesis, and then there's what you do about it.
So, they can exist even at the finest scale.
The missing term is synthesis, right?
So, when we talk about putting things back together, we are talking about… He uses the word, yeah.
Oh, I missed it.
Synthesize knowledge into coherent picture.
So, synthesis is basically large-scale theory, and very often the experiment that reveals the result, the whole purpose of that exercise is not the result.
The purpose of that exercise is that it reflects back on a hypothesis that you cannot know the truth of directly.
And so, if you take the example which he alludes to here of the mouse telomere issue, By predicting that wild mice would have short telomeres, the point was not that wild mice have short telomeres, the point is if The model that predicted that is true, then it also says that senescence, that is growing feeble with age, is likely an intractable problem, right?
The fact that mice have short telomeres implies that the model is correct, and so knowing how to do that job well is really important, but the most important thing about it Is that almost all of the experimental work that is done is wasted if it was not embedded in a rich synthetic theoretical framework, right?
Because very often, and it's maddening as a theorist sometimes to read the empirical work that's been done because a lot of it was like… Sometimes, you say.
You really needed an experiment to tell you that?
Because the fact is, everything we know says that that's effectively certain, and yet you ran an expensive experiment to discover it.
Well, and here, this presages, this points to what we will talk about at the end of the show, I think, with regard to the sophistry around, well like, point to the scientific result that shows that sex is binary.
Like, no one ever did that in empirical form because it's unnecessary.
Because we can point to the 500 million to 2 billion, depending on how you count, years of evolution of sexual reproduction, of binary sexual reproduction.
No, no one has written the paper that was peer-reviewed, and we'll get to this.
The things that people, both inside but increasingly especially outside of the academy of academic science, point to, like, the things that we now use as ways to prove that we're actually doing science.
I used to say in the classroom, like, okay, well, I didn't show up in a lab coat with glassware, therefore I must not be doing science, right?
Like, what makes you a scientist?
Peer review is one of these things that people trot out all the time.
Well, if it's not peer-reviewed, it must not be science.
And we were talking about a paper a couple weeks ago here on Dark Horse, and I don't remember the specifics, but in which the author said of another paper, you know what, they're going to say this isn't peer-reviewed yet, but it has been because I am the peer.
I have all of the credentials and I have all of the work that needs to have been done in order to assess this paper.
And I am saying, As have many of my colleagues, that this work is good.
So, you know, at some level, take your institutionally sanctioned peer review and shove it, because that has now become a tool of the orthodoxy and the homogenization of thought.
Yeah, it's a gatekeeping tool.
So, peer review is not the same thing as review by peers.
And he does say almost exactly that.
But I don't know how to describe it.
But in a world where science was really science, that is to say, all of the people involved in the endeavor were actually interested in the thing that all of them believe they're interested in, and we are told they are interested in, which is discovering as much truth as we can because it provides power for us to do more of what we want to do on Earth, right?
In that world, It would be very upsetting to empiricists that something had gone wrong at the level of the theorists and those involved in synthesis because the idea that most of what we do scientifically, the work that still goes on, the experiments that we run, is unnecessary, also means that our return on investment is ridiculously low, right?
It's like if you, you know, wanted to find oil to fuel your civilization, and you sidelined the geologists who could tell you where to look, like that would be dumb, right?
You'd end up drilling most of your wells in places where oil couldn't possibly be found.
And you could have known that.
And you know, so you, why would you do that?
And the point is, what we've got is a system where Science is functioning as a jobs program.
What it is doing is it is employing people to do science like things, it is not employing them to make maximal progress towards some objective like knowing how the universe works.
And that's truly alarming, because we our tools are getting more powerful.
Not knowing how the universe works is getting more dangerous.
And so, you know, effectively, if you want a cheap, elegant, efficient system, you don't get to sideline half of it in favor of the half that needs the grants, right?
That would be a self-destructive thing to do.
And that's where we are.
That is where we are.
So, under his third point, which is the one that I'm going to spend the least time of, he talks about the lack of conceptual clarity in mathematics and physics.
He says, Patterson says in this essay from 2021, more importantly within the minds of intellectuals, even if they naively believe in the existence of a measurement independent world, upon hearing that prestigious physicists disagree, most people end up conforming to the ideas of physicists who they believe are more intelligent than themselves.
And, you know, this is part of the trick.
This is indeed part of the trick.
We all, if you've thought about it, whether or not you have a PhD or you didn't graduate from high school, if you think, if I say to you four, five disciplines that you could major in in college, and they are history and literature and psychology and And physics.
You have a sense of which of those people are probably paid the most and which of those people probably have the most prestige at the university that they're at.
And the hard sciences and mathematics tend to come with the most prestige.
And there are a lot of people who will say, well, that's because they're based on – they still have the greatest relationship with reality.
And, you know, that may be true.
It should be true.
And there were those who will say, well, it actually does provide the greatest return on investment because there are practical applications and because physics may be the basic science, but from there you can get to engineering and therefore you can end up earning revenue.
That's part of it too.
But we all know, whether or not we've thought about it explicitly, that there is sort of a hierarchy of disciplines that we have in our heads.
And even people who view themselves as the sense makers for everyone else, the would-be journalists in particular, who are very often not confident in their ability to assess science or math directly, which is to all of our detriment, are way too likely to defer to the authority of someone with a degree in science or math and basically say,
When confronted with, for instance, oh, there's a whole bunch of people with degrees in science who say X, even if there's now dissidents, for instance, on the same issue with the same kinds of degrees who say, yeah, but here's where all the flaws in that logic are.
The smart people who don't do science or math will say, I'm just going to go with the numbers.
I'm just going to treat this like it's democracy and whoever got the most votes must be the most true.
And that's of course not how science works.
Science is not democratic, and especially if a system has been captured by a number of forces.
If, for instance, we're living in a dark age, then the fact that all of the people inside of the system are saying the same thing doesn't actually tell you anything because there's a very high likelihood that those voices are not independent, that you've actually got one giant data point.
That says, ah, we believe X, and there's a whole bunch of independent data points over here going, actually, we don't think you're right, and we'd like to see your data that you keep claiming you have.
And the fact that those voices keep getting shut down is further potential evidence that maybe there's something to be listened to there.
Which actually goes to this problem of philosophy having no place, right?
It is a remnant that, as you point out, resides in all of our degrees, right?
But it resides there as what most people in, you know, most people who have a PhD probably don't spend a minute in their entire career thinking about the fact, you know, that it's a doctor of philosophy.
This raises a point, right?
So, we have talked here, it is in our book, about the idea of metaphorical truth, right?
Metaphorical truths are things that aren't literally true.
Metaphorical truths are not literally true.
But they are useful, they are adaptive, you are at advantage if you behave as if they're true.
Because something similar to them is true, or analogous to them is true, but you can't spell it out yet.
So you need them, but you don't want to mistake them for the actual article.
Now this, we apply this to religion.
For example, but the problem is that scientists don't get where it fits in their day job, right?
So scientists will frequently tell you that they have no faith right that they are faithless that that's what they are They are objective and the point is not we do here.
Yeah, you couldn't possibly be without faith because it is actually a hundred percent required in order for you to walk into the lab and look into a microscope and report on what you've seen the idea that you There are a lot of assumptions built into the fact that you think you looked into a microscope.
You think it exists.
You think the stuff on the slide is real and that your report of it is something other than random, right?
It's not likely to be wrong, but it is an article of faith required.
But in any case, if we go back to what we were talking about 20 minutes ago, There are certain kinds of ideas that you have to hold in order to do your work.
But the question is, can you manage to hold them with a degree of agnosticism about how true they are, right?
So that you can go back and not be totally crushed if they turn out not to be right.
And we can see this in, for example, the many worlds interpretation of the universe, right?
There are an infinite number of trajectories.
There's a version of you that is The same in every way except, you know, it scratched its nose a minute ago and you didn't, right?
There are an infinite number of these things.
Well, it may be that you can make great progress in physics by saying, well, let's treat the universe as if there are an infinite number of versions of it.
Right?
Which doesn't make it right.
It may be that there's some other way of explaining how the universe works that way.
But if you do mistake it as right, and you say, if we behave this way, it results in us doing productive work, therefore it must be true, then you've lost the game.
Right?
So, it's really a question of… If the game is, let's figure out what's true, as opposed to, let's keep ourselves employed.
Right, exactly.
Well, in the Let's Keep Ourselves Employed, in fact, it's perversely useful to believe crazy things, right?
Because people love hearing about the infinite number of universes, right?
And they don't love hearing, we don't really know what the truth is that this works instead of, but let's tell you the spackle we use to cover the hole in our knowledge here.
Yeah, it's really unglamorous.
Yeah, it's really unglamorous.
And, you know, that's the game, you know, if the game was really how, you know, let's take whatever contributions you're going to make and see how long they last.
And those who win the game are the ones who contribute something that lasts the longest, that is useful farthest into the future.
Well, then the incentives aligned correctly.
If it's, you know, let's see how many people you can razzle dazzle at the moment.
Well, okay, you can razzle dazzle people with magic, which doesn't make it true.
Indeed.
Peterson's fourth point with regard to how it is that we got here, which he is positing is a hundredish-year-old period in a dark age at the moment.
Four, the methods of scientific inquiry have been conflated with the processes of academia.
So we've already said this, but his section here is quite good.
What is science, he asks?
In our current paradigm, science is what scientists do.
Science is what trained people in lab coats do at universities, according to established practices.
Science is what's published in scientific journals after going through the formal peer review process.
Good science is what wins awards that science gives out.
In other words, science is now equivalent to the rituals of academia.
Real empirical inquiry has been replaced by conformity to bureaucratic procedures.
If a scientific paper has checked off all the boxes of academic formalism, it is considered true science, regardless of the intellectual quality of the paper.
Real peer review has been replaced by formal peer review, a religious ritual that is supposed to improve the quality of academic literature, despite all evidence to the contrary.
The academic publishing system has obviously become dominated by petty and capricious gatekeepers.
With the invention of the internet, it's probably unnecessary altogether.
Well, so asterisk here, I would say what keeps it useful, even to those who don't think they're benefiting from it, but who are working still with an academic science, is it allows them to decide, oh, actually, I only read pieces in these two journals.
And therefore, if it's in one of those journals, I'll read it.
And if it's not, I don't have to pay attention, which is not a scientific approach, but it does help widow Well, wait, wait, wait.
So you're dividing two things.
One is the question of whether this is a quality improver, and the other is curatorial.
Right.
Exactly.
Yes.
Following standard scientific procedure sounds great unless it's revealed that the procedures are mistaken.
Peer review sounds great unless your peers are incompetent.
Upon careful review of many different disciplines, the scientific record demonstrates that standard practice is indeed insufficient to yield reliable knowledge, and chances are your scientific peers are actually incompetent.
I'm reminded of another story in which I was talking with a colleague, a scientist, about another colleague who had a PhD such that she was supposedly a scientist.
And he said, well, so-and-so says X, therefore, and she was in a slightly different subdiscipline from either of us, so-and-so, Dr. so-and-so says X, therefore, we can build that into our model.
And I said, she doesn't do science.
What?
She's not a scientist.
What are you talking about?
She has this degree.
I mean, I actually literally had this conversation with a colleague 10 years ago, maybe, at Evergreen.
And he said, on what basis?
I said, now I'm going to turn that around on you.
Where have you ever seen her think in any way that is scientific?
I'm not saying she's a bad person, and I'm not saying the stories she tells aren't interesting, and many of them may be true, but that doesn't make them science.
And this was completely shocking to the guy I was talking with, who I do Regarding a scientist who I have seen think scientifically and do scientific things, but it seemed to him like the ultimate sign of disrespect that her having been stamped on the forehead with a Ph.D.
in a science from an institution that is allowed to do such things, that I, having been stamped on the forehead with a Ph.D.
in a science by a different institution, having actually done science and having actually been engaged in teaching undergraduates how to do science, should say about another such person, I've seen no evidence that there's any science there.
And being willing to do that is part of what is absolutely necessary if we are, you know, if we are in fact in the Dark Age, in order to pull ourselves out of that tailspin, everyone who can still think and who is able to look around and go, okay, where's the truth has got to be able to say that thing over there?
Not science.
Nope.
So we are stuck in a puzzle in which the labels on the boxes are almost devoid of information about the contents of the boxes.
And so this works in both directions, right?
Because the way the scientific endeavor, the social scientific academic endeavor unfolds involves the need to do certain kinds of work, right?
You wouldn't want to report an experiment that you didn't run.
So there must be an experiment which requires, you know, certain people to, you know, take a pipette from here and pipette it into there, right?
So To work to make that cheap, universities, primary investigators, effectively hire people to do the work.
That work gets paid for in the form of a degree, which does not say that you ever demonstrated the ability to test a hypothesis or even a deep understanding of what a hypothesis is, right?
Where they come from and how you would test one, right?
There's no guarantee that somebody with a degree that says they should know that knows that.
At all.
And so lots of people with these degrees simply, as you point out, they don't behave in a scientific way, they don't think in a scientific way, and if asked to do so, they couldn't because they just haven't practiced, right?
They haven't learned the counterintuitive part of it.
The thing I used to say is that some people wouldn't know a hypothesis if it hit them in the head.
Yeah.
Wouldn't recognize it as such.
Like, what is that thing that just came at me?
Well, people, for example, do not notice that paper after paper in journals called things like science don't have a hypothesis in them, right?
That should alarm you because it is an essential piece of the puzzle.
As we have said, every paper ought to either lead to a hypothesis.
It's perfectly valid to make a scientific observation that then suggests a hypothesis in need of testing.
Back when I was being asked to do peer review, because that is one of the pieces of free work that working professors are asked to do, my primary feedback on almost every paper that I saw was, what's the hypothesis?
And it doesn't.
Back when I was being asked to do peer review, because that is one of the pieces of free work that working professors are asked to do, my primary feedback on almost every paper that I saw was, what's the hypothesis?
I actually stopped there.
What is the reason to assess any of the rest of this if this doesn't appear to have been hypothesis driven?
In which case, again, if there's no hypothesis, maybe cool story, maybe interesting observations then could form the basis for hypothesis.
And if you frame it that way and don't claim that this is a complete piece of science, okay.
But they're always in these journals as if like, oh, and here's the science we did.
But you didn't because you didn't have the hypothesis going into it.
Yeah, absolutely.
And, I mean, we sometimes talk about the fact that there's no good way to teach somebody how you come up with a hypothesis, right?
It's really a matter of a lot of thinking about, you know, if this thing that I suspect is true, is true, then these other things that I can measure will turn out to be this surprising thing.
Right?
That's not a, you know, it's a how do you think a thought kind of a thing.
You have to discover it on your own.
So it's no surprise that people's educations in science almost all hiccup at that level.
And so what they end up is so specialized that there's only two hypotheses in an entire field and the whole, you know, your whole career is involved in studying in around those things, but you've never generated one.
But anyway, I wanted to point out the other thing.
Lots of people who have the degree don't know how to do science because it didn't come up in their training, right?
But lots of people who do science didn't end up with the degree because for one thing, they probably got driven out in the process of being trained in this bogus art, and so they ended up in other things.
They ended up in engineering, they ended up starting a business, something like this.
And, you know, we know a number of these people.
So were you to try to... Or driven out of the mainstream economy entirely.
There are a number of people who are extraordinary at scientific thinking who, you know, you would have a hard time finding with any economic mark on the world.
Yeah, that's true.
There are a lot of people who are unfortunately sidelined entirely and then a bunch of people who've repurposed for something economic or design-oriented.
But if you were to try to bootstrap a new, you know, we have the argument in this paper here that maybe we're headed out of this dark age.
Well, presumably that would be the result of people's scientific work again becoming visible as a result of the fact that the Academy has failed.
But the thing is, I guarantee you a lot of those people are not going to be degreed.
In fact, it might even be an obstacle.
If you were trained in the nonsense version of science, you might be less good at doing the good version.
That's right.
So his fifth line of evidence for we've been in a dark age is 5.
Academia has been corrupted by government and corporate funding.
Now, we've said a lot about this already, of course, so I'm not going to spend more time there right now, but number 6.
Human biology, psychology, and social dynamics make critical thinking difficult.
He says, therefore the real causes for error are often socio-psychological, not intellectual.
An absence of reasoning rather than a mistake of reasoning.
This feels very, very important to me.
Rather than grapple with difficult concepts, nearly every modern intellectual is trying to avoid embarrassment for themselves and for their social class.
They are trying to maintain their relative position in a social hierarchy that is constructed around orthodoxies.
They adhere to these orthodoxies, not because they thought the ideas through, but because they cannot bear the social cost of disagreement.
So there's at least two distinct things there, both of which we've already talked about today, but it is the key problem with many of the supposedly heterodox communities that emerge now, or were emerging, for instance, before two years ago, and then come COVID, could not see their way to disagreeing with any of the orthodoxy over in COVID space.
And this is part of why it is not sufficient if Higher Ed were to be fixed, if the Academy were to be fixed, it is not sufficient to scrape the sort of rancid frosting off the top that might be considered to be woke ideology or movements to shame everyone with a different demographic than yourself, which is the actually racist and sexist and all of this stuff that is flying under the banner of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
It's not sufficient to just scrape that frosting off the top, because what you're left with is an equally rancid cupcake underneath.
And I don't want that cupcake any more than I want the frosting.
We need an actually new thing built with a combination of Enlightenment ideals and values, and the thinking around how to keep both things in your head at the same time.
This is what we think is true.
This is what I now think might be true instead.
The probability is maybe I don't need, you know, depending on what the work is, maybe I do or don't need to keep precise probabilities alive around what I think the likelihood is of the orthodoxy versus my new idea.
But as I explore ideas further on, remember always that I'm sitting on some foundation that is probabilistic, and that if that fails, what happens to the rest of my argument?
That little thing right there, which we talked about at the beginning of this hour, seems to be something that almost no one is prepared to do.
And yet, I think, from our experience teaching undergraduates, almost everyone can do.
Well, first of all, in passing, I love the idea of scraping the rancid frosting off the rotten cupcake.
I think you hit the nail on the head with respect to academia right there.
But the problem is that Only a tiny number of people, A, have the instinct to notice that they are engaged in a gigantic emergent fraud, right?
And that even if you begin to get that sense, you very quickly get the message that you're going to be Injured in a most profound way if you continue to investigate what is down that road.
And so, you know, if you think last week we talked about why Ryan Cole seems to be one of the only pathologists calling attention to new patterns that they're seeing in medical samples in the last year.
Well, what could possibly explain the absence of other pathologists?
We did hear evidence of some other pathologists who were doing this work.
Okay.
No doubt he's not perfectly singular, but nonetheless, if this is happening generally, then the point is, why aren't all the pathologists pointing this out?
And the answer is, what happens if you discover that In my job, if I do my job, I will lose my job, right?
What do most people do when they discover that doing the thing you've been hired to do is going to cause you no longer to be hired to do anything?
And the answer is most people don't have a backup plan.
They don't have a mental architecture for thinking what that implies.
If I stand up alone, I'll get shot.
I need a critical mass to stand up with me.
Everyone knows that they can't be first.
And so how even if you knew that there was 20% of your field who was willing to stand up, that you'll actually all stand up right at the same time, as opposed to kind of wait until you're maybe second, right?
And things that would have seemed impossible in advance, and this is not about academics, but things like the vaccine mandates kicking nurses out of work.
When what we need, what we are told, is that we need nurses more than ever, and I believe that we need nurses more than ever, and yet at exactly the moment when we actively and 100% need skilled professionals, those skilled professionals are not being allowed to work because they stand up.
Because they are standing up to what they view as unconscionable mandates.
Both for themselves and, frankly, for others as well.
And so, if the system, such as it is, is willing to do that to nurses, of course it'll do it to anyone.
It'll do it to anyone, and it can do it at a level that is almost impossible to believe, right?
What are the chances that the COVID dissidents would include the guy who invented the underlying technology behind the vaccines, right?
That's a stunning piece of information, but the point is he is dismissed in every way, right?
Everything they can possibly say they do.
Anti-vax, he's making it up.
It doesn't matter that he's got the receipts, that he's got the patents and all of this.
So the point is, it's not even like, well, I don't want to stand up alone.
It doesn't matter how large the number of people are, or how credible they are, or most importantly, how predictive they have been.
When the people who have correctly predicted the pattern that would emerge in the pandemic are dismissed as charlatans and the people who got everything wrong are the ones doing the dismissing, it should be obvious that if you're going along with the people who haven't gotten anything right yet, You're on the wrong team, but nope, that's not how it works.
The fact is, the real message isn't, those people are charlatans and they're wrong.
The answer is, if you stand with those people, you're going to get hurt.
Yeah.
You don't want to get hurt, do you?
One last short excerpt from this remarkable essay.
Individuals who consider themselves part of the smart person club, that is, those that self-describe as intellectuals and are often part of the academy, have a difficult time admitting errors in their own ideology.
But they have an exceptionally difficult time admitting errors by great minds of the past, due to group dynamics.
It's one thing to admit that you don't understand quantum mechanics.
It's an entirely different thing to claim Niels Bohr did not understand quantum mechanics.
The former admission can actually gain you prestige within the physics club.
The latter will get you ostracized.
All fields of thought are under constant threat of being captured by superficial consensus by those who are seeking to be part of an authoritative group.
These people tend to have superior social and manipulative skills, are better at communicating with the general public, and are willing to attack any critics as if their lives depended on it, for understandable reasons, since the benefits of social prestige are indeed on the line when sacred assumptions are being challenged.
So that actually just perfectly wraps up what we were just discussing.
Maybe it's already an hour into our conversation.
Maybe it's time to segue with all of this in mind to one of the couple other topics that you wanted to talk about today.
Sure.
Yeah, there were a couple that were on my mind.
You can have that if you want.
Yeah, one of them has to do with an indication in the way people are and are not speaking up that something isn't quite right in the style of thinking, right?
So, what I wanted to point to was As I mentioned last week, there is something galling about the gaslighting of the vaccine injured, right?
It's just simply, it is galling at a human level that we would fail to take care of people who just simply did what they were asked and it came up badly.
But here's the extension to that thought.
It ought to be galvanizing.
It doesn't matter which camp you were in.
You might have been in the camp that said, look, COVID is a terrifically dangerous disease.
We have this tool that is going to limit its spread, which ultimately it did not.
But at the time, people thought that it would.
And it works if people get it in large numbers.
It will fail if people don't get it, right?
So if you were in that camp, right?
And the point is, look, let's be adults about this.
Medical technologies have unpredictable effects.
They may be overwhelmingly useful, but it doesn't mean nobody gets hurt.
Right?
So people who advocated, hey, just get the damn vaccine ought to be united with those of us who were like, hey, wait a minute, there's an awful lot of uncertainty around these new technologies.
There's more novelty to these technologies, less testing, and you're proposing a mass vaccination program.
So if these things turn out to be really terrible, you will have done a tremendous amount of harm.
Shouldn't matter which of those two camps you were in, or if you were in some third camp, anybody ought to be able to see that whether the harms were very rare or very common, it is incumbent on us morally and in terms of the system functioning
To figure out how many people were hurt and to treat them very, very well, to study the conditions that they have, to figure out what it is that alleviates these conditions and make sure those people are taken care of.
And the reasons for this are many, right?
One, we can learn from our errors in thinking.
Two, we encourage people in the future to follow Good advice with respect to, you know, we have reason to believe this is safe and we want you to take it because that will increase the effectiveness of our campaign to control this pathogen, right?
If you really believe that, if you think that that's what was being said.
And it is also something that you should be interested in, that we find out just how rare these adverse events were and that we treat those people very well so that the message next time isn't, you're going to be left to your own devices if our new medical technology injures you.
No matter how good a treatment, no matter how good a piece of medical technology, there will be some adverse events.
This is just a truth of the universe, right?
You know, sometimes broccoli harms people, right?
Sometimes Aspirin harms people.
Sometimes some particular novel treatments harm people, and pretending that this isn't happening raises the question of who would actually be interested in treating the people who did what we were all being told was the right thing to do, and they went and they got the treatment.
Who benefits from gaslighting those people and making it harder for them to move forward with their lives in a way that is maximally effective and healthy, given that they actually were injured?
Right.
And so this is actually, this is the conclusion of this line of thought is the absence of the people who were so enthusiastic and so aggressive about the vaccine campaign, the absence of those people from the chorus who wants the vaccine injured to be taken seriously by the medical establishment is conspicuous.
The only people who should have an interest in not seeking out the vaccine injured and treating them are people who wish to obscure how many of them there are and so can't afford to have them counted.
And that shouldn't include any of the decent people, right?
If you got it wrong, and let's just say maybe we don't know which side had it wrong, but everybody who's interested in finding out ought to be united in seeing those people treated well.
Right.
So, the absence of some of these folks from that chorus is conspicuous and it raises questions about what is really occurring.
So, I hope that people who hear that and were on the aggressively pro-vaccine Side in this argument think about it and realize yes.
Oh, of course.
I want those people treated It's in our interest.
It's in our interest now It is the morally right thing and it is certainly in our interest the next time There's some vaccine and a question about whether or not it's safe to take we need to know how how safe these were For us to be able to do that next time Absolutely.
Hello Absolutely.
So, finally, you wanted to revisit the epidemic of sophistry.
And I believe that's actually the title that we gave to an episode where you talked about sophistry a fair bit.
Yeah.
Yeah, I wanted to talk about the epidemic of sophistry because we've had this film emerge this week, which you and I have not seen.
It's paywalled, but we've certainly seen clips of it.
What is a Woman?
A Matt Walsh piece.
And it has sparked a number of, you know, investigations of that question.
And it alerted me to one thing that I thought needed exploring.
There is a trick that is played.
It's a legalistic trick.
And the trick is, oh, well, you say, you know, women's sports should only include people who, you know, born females.
Well, are you able to define those terms?
And the implication is that a failure to be able to define a term indicates that you're a poser for using that term.
Certainly you shouldn't be using terms you can't define.
In fact, that's not the case.
In fact, we do this all the time.
And in fact, you would be utterly hobbled in communicating almost anything if you only were allowed to use words that you could define with a reasonable degree of precision.
And so actually, Zach, would you put up my elephant tweet?
and put it where we can read it if you would.
It's a lot of dead air.
Yeah, it is a lot of dead air.
Okay, so I put up the following thought experiment.
I said, consider this.
If we choose a thousand adults at random and ask them to define elephant, it is unlikely that any of them could do it.
But if we showed each of them a thousand animals, only one of which was an elephant, They would all identify it correctly, okay?
Now, what do I mean by this?
Lots of people came back and they said, well, I think lots of people could do a decent job defining an elephant.
No, I promise you, you can't, because the definition of an elephant is inherently phylogenetic.
The definition is, an elephant is the descendant of the most recent common ancestor of all elephants.
People are going to hate that.
They're going to hate it, but that's... It's so secular, using elephant to define elephants.
It's just true though.
It's just simply true.
And anything else you try to do runs afoul of all kinds of ambiguities, right?
If you try to define it based on the large ears, the large stature, the trunk, whatever it is.
The point is you're giving characteristics that will help you recognize one, and indeed they are characteristics that will help you recognize one, but they don't define elephant.
And so the point is for a thousand people chosen at random to be able to identify an elephant from a thousand animals chosen at random, That says that there is something unambiguous about elephantness, right?
The ability to recognize that thing does not depend on your ability to spell out what the synchronon of elephantness is, right?
My basic point is, we all know what a woman is, right?
In fact, in this case, the definition is pretty simple and we've gotten shy about it because we're afraid of all of the questions about ambiguities at the edge that we can't answer, even though there is no fundamental ambiguity.
Zach, you can put up my screen now.
So this is not your point, but one of the points here is actually every human being past a certain age should be able to easily define what a woman is just as they can define what a man is.
And I did so in the end of March on my sub stack in a piece I called I Am a Woman and a Biologist.
And no, you shouldn't need to be a biologist to be able to do this.
A woman, of course, is an adult human female, and I then define adult human and female, female being the point on which people seem very interested in being sophists.
Females, I posit, are individuals who do or did or will or would, but for developmental or genetic anomalies, produce eggs.
Eggs are large, sessile gametes.
Gametes are sex cells.
In plants and animals, and most other sexually reproducing organisms, there are two sexes, female and male.
Like adult, the term female applies across many species.
Female is used to distinguish such people from males, who produce—do, or did, or will, or would, but for development or genetic anomalies—produce small, mobile gametes, that is to say sperm, or in the case of plants, pollen.
In this case, there is a simple definition, and everyone actually should be able to have that right at the tip of their fingertips.
But the elephant question, not now, not here, it'd be interesting to get into how does asking people to define elephant differ from asking people to define woman?
Part of the issue, although they are both biological at one level, ...is that elephant is a lineage, and female is not.
Woman is not a lineage.
And this is part of why, actually, sex is completely different from, for instance, race.
And so we lump things like sex and race together, and we talk about privilege and discrimination and all of this, but sex and race are completely different kinds of concepts.
And whereas elephant is a solid lineage concept within evolutionary biology, race not so much, but at least it alludes to the idea of lineages.
And sex doesn't at all, because we all come from an equal number of male and female ancestors.
So let's take that... Well, sorry, unless you go back far enough to the asexual stuff, at which point we all come from 100% female ancestors.
Right.
So, let's take those three cases, right?
Elephant, race, and sex.
Elephant, race, and sex, because what this really says, and in fact, if you would put up that other tweet, a Twitter mutual, a friend of mine, Amazon Eve, who I believe is a trans person, challenged what I had said on Twitter And asked me, well, if you're going to do this with sex effectively, why not race?
And the answer is... You don't get to have it both ways.
Right.
I don't want to have it both ways, but what I want to do is apply the exactly right toolkit and get exactly the amount of biological information in each of these categories.
And here's what you've got.
Elephant, when Heather says elephant is a lineage, it's a clade, right?
There is zero ambiguity about what is and isn't an elephant because there was a most recent common ancestor of all of the elephants and there is the set of all of its descendants.
You are either descended from that animal or you are not.
If you are not, you are not an elephant.
If you are, you are inherently an elephant no matter what you look like.
So, not to say that we will ever have that degree of precision, right?
So, you said there's zero ambiguity, but hearkening back to what we were talking about early on in this episode, the fact that science is a toolkit designed to align what we understand to be true as closely as possible with what is actually true, That doesn't mean that we will A, ever 100% get there, nor that we will know that we are there when we do get there.
Well, no, this is a matter of logical necessity.
In other words, if I meet a person, let's say that I meet a person who was dropped on the doorstep of an orphanage, right, as an infant, has no memory of what took place before the event, only develops the ability to have memory after they've already become a member of the orphanage.
Right?
I can say that this person had two grandmothers.
I can't say who they were, right?
But I can say that this person had two grandmothers and two grandfathers, right?
And they had one mother and one father, right?
That's just a matter of logical necessity.
Yes, I'm just talking about the boundaries of elephant-ness.
It doesn't matter.
The point is I don't even, you know, the term elephant, it occurred to me as we launched into this that we could be saying proboscidean, right?
We could take the larger clade of elephant-like things or we could take elephant as, you know, one of two species, right?
Extant.
Extant species.
It doesn't matter.
The point is you tell me which thing you want to define and I'll tell you that the definition is the same.
It's any descendant of the most recent common ancestor of that group.
Operational, not so much, but that's not what we're trying to do here.
We're trying to define it scientifically.
What it is that all of those people who identified the one in a thousand creatures as an elephant have identified is that they've identified the descendant of that most recent common ancestor.
And their failure to come up with a scientific definition says nothing about their ability to actually recognize an elephant from an array, from a lineup.
Right, which we know because they'll all agree on which the elephant is, right?
So we know it's real, but We just can't specify exactly how they got there, but it's really unambiguous.
Now the thing is, as you point out, woman is not a lineage, right?
Because woman is like you take a lineage, the human lineage, and then you turn off half of it by virtue of a developmental switch that went one way or the other in each person, right?
Now in some places it may have been ambiguous, but your point has been from the beginning, That there is a thing which, as far as we know, is never ambiguous.
Which type of gametes do you make or would you make if you had been intact?
Is it the same as lineage?
No.
Is it biologically ambiguous?
No.
That's right.
So, the point is you can do the thing there.
So, what about Amazon Eve's point about race?
Well, you can do this there too.
The fact is race isn't the same kind of thing as woman and it isn't the same kind of thing as elephant, right?
Because let's say that you had two people who were as embedded in a given race as Anybody ever is, right?
You take somebody who is as close to, I don't know.
How about Maasai or Han Chinese?
Okay, Han Chinese and Maasai, right?
They fall in love.
They have an offspring.
What race is it?
Well, a razor's edge between those two.
I don't know, right?
Does that mean that Maasai doesn't exist?
No, it certainly doesn't.
Does it mean Han Chinese doesn't exist?
No, it doesn't.
What it means is that we know the edges of this concept, whatever its biological nature is, are imprecise.
Right?
Does that invalidate it?
No.
You know, when does a pond become a lake?
Right?
Are there lakes?
Are there ponds?
Can we talk about the different kinds of creatures that tend to inhabit them?
We can.
Is there a, you know, an exact, you know, Cubic centimeter of water that causes something to jump from one category to the next?
No.
Is that a crippling fact?
No.
We often talk about the fuzzy borders in biology not demonstrating anything about the lack of reality of the categories.
As you descend a mountain into a valley, our inability to say exactly at what point the mountain becomes the valley doesn't render either the concept of mountain or valley unreal.
In fact, you know that because the river will be in the valley.
That is one way that you know that, I would say.
Same thing with a pond and a lake, the distinction between them seems even more fuzzy.
But that is a little tricky.
It's a little tricky to invoke precisely here, because in fact what renders lineage fuzzy is because of sexual reproduction, right?
And in fact, actually, the clip from our private Q&A that was actually released today, I think, is us talking a bit about lineage selection and showing a visual that my graduate advisor Arnold Kluge used to show with, you know, individuals making choices about reproduction and, you know, making babies and them going on to make babies with other individuals.
And, you know, you scale out and out and out in time, In time, not in space.
And you end up with these neatly bifurcating trees that say, you know, and then this species became two species, became four species, etc.
And that elides a whole bunch of the actual stuff that happens at the closer in level, temporally, where, you know, you and I have created a lineage with our two children, but we do not come from the same lineage.
And so there is a fractal nature of lineage, but also a reticulating nature of lineage.
That makes it very different.
You can pick two very distinct and relatively homogeneous populations on the Earth, like Han and Maasai, and say they're unlikely to have very many recent ancestors in common, say within the last I don't even know.
At least within the last thousand years.
Yeah.
Okay.
But do they actually share an ancestor?
Of course.
Yeah.
We all do.
We all 100% do, right?
So, it depends on how far back you're going.
And so, it scales, and it's fractal, and lineage is both real and also reticulating, and you have to specify what you're talking about.
And so, with regard to elephant, It sounds like a circular definition, but it's actually not.
An elephant is all of the descendants of the most recent common ancestor of elephants.
You can do that with humans, with Homo sapiens, without ever being able to or being forced to define who that first Homo sapiens was.
We can't do that with race, because race doesn't work that way.
Because we are too reticulated.
Because we are too intermixed.
And we always have been, and we always will be.
So I want to point out the bad mental habit that this reveals.
The reason that we get into trouble about this, right?
The reason that people say, well, if you're going to do that with sex, then, you know, you're going to be forced to do it about race.
It's like, well, do what?
Do science?
Sure.
Let's.
But the point is, there is a sense that, look, You're telling us what team you're on, at the point that you start saying, look, the thing that defines what sex you are is what gametes you are built to produce, right?
Well, then you're going to get stuck with that when it comes to race or something like this.
And the point is, look, if we take you to a forest, right?
And we say, look, I want to show you something about this forest.
Come with us, right?
We'll lead you into the forest.
And then we have- And then, okay, check this out.
We've got an electron microscope.
In the forest?
In the forest with a long extension cord.
It seems like a bad choice.
Yeah, it's going to melt.
But anyway.
No, the fungus is going to eat it.
Yeah, it's going to disintegrate into the forest at some point.
But my point is, look, is the truth of the things that you need an electron microscope to see in the forest somehow not the forest?
No, of course it is, right?
We can look at the structures inside the cells of the creatures of the forest.
We can zoom out and we can see entire organisms in the forest.
We can look at how the forest changes over time, the ebb and flow of the different species.
All of these things are elements of the forest.
And the point is, our job as biologists...
Is to apply exactly the right biology in exactly the right way so that the conclusions that are built out of it are actually robust, right?
Is it possible to do it perfectly?
No.
But the point is, yeah, let's do as well as we can.
Just as, you know, is it possible to play a perfect game of tennis?
I doubt it, right?
But you play as well as you can.
So the point is, look, yeah.
Is biology relevant to race?
Of course it is.
Is biology relevant to sex?
Of course it is, right?
Is it relevant to... Does it apply the same way to both?
Of course it does not.
Right.
There are pieces that do, there are pieces that don't.
And so, look, that's all we're saying is, you know, you've got this toolkit.
It's full of the most amazing stuff and it applies to all the questions you care about.
Can we figure out how to apply it so that it is revealing to everybody, right?
It doesn't, you know, it's not, it doesn't hand a win to some team, right?
You get a complex, interesting result that you'll then have to grapple with the implications of.
But why wouldn't you do it?
Why would you relegate yourself to a universe Of teams, right?
The team thing, it's a loser.
It's not, you know, in fact, it goes exactly to the conclusion of that Patterson essay.
The fact is this is not a productive mechanism for figuring out what's right, right?
The team thing is a loser and we are losing the advantage that comes from not dealing with things that way for the lack of the appropriate toolkit.
Indeed.
Well, are we there?
I think we might be there.
All right.
This has been fun.
I hope you guys found it so as well.
We will be taking a short break then and coming back to you with Q&A.
You can ask questions at darkhorsesubmissions.com now and into the Q&A.
We will be back in 15 minutes or so with that.
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