In this 139th 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 reality is going to be tolerated—by internet randos, by magazines supposedly devoted to disseminating scientific findings to an interested public, and by actual scientific journals. A new editorial in Nature Human Behavior is breath-taking in its rejection of the scientific process and values, ...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 130 something.
9.
Nine.
139, of course.
Yeah.
Yeah, I did not think to look up the number, but 139.
So we were, of course, off last week, unavoidably, as our producer was... In Ecuador.
In Ecuador, yeah.
And yeah, not just metaphorically, he was actually physically on the ground in Ecuador.
Yeah.
Just back, spiritually still there a little bit, psychologically, mentally.
Absolutely, yes.
He's coming down from the mountains.
Yeah, indeed.
But here we are, the end of August here and everywhere on the planet.
End of August, so it is of course chilly here in the Pacific Northwest.
It is not chilly here because it is the end of August, August being the most perfect month in the Pacific Northwest.
It is in the high 70s, low 80s, it is perfect here.
I haven't checked in in the last hour, but it was chilly earlier.
It's gorgeous out.
We're going to talk to you a little bit about reality and whether or not we shall be allowed to abide by it in modern times.
We've got a number of other things to talk to you about today, but all of them have to do a little bit with whether or not what we are seeing with our own eyes matches what we are being told we're seeing or told we have to do.
And as usual, we come to you from an evolutionary perspective, a scientific perspective.
And from Portland.
And from a Portland perspective?
No, a heterodox Portland perspective.
Indeed.
But, you know, we will say, as we've said before, that here in Portland, a city that we do in fact love, We are stopped on the street often when we're out by other Portlanders who say thank you.
And so we thank you, and for those of you, the vast majority of our audience who's not in Portland, and some of our audience who imagines that everything that happens in Portland is insane, no, you're wrong.
There are a whole lot of people here who are awesome, awake, amazing, and cannot believe what is happening to this beautiful city.
Yeah, I get stopped on the street and I hear that message, and then I get stopped in the street if I choose to drive at the wrong hour because of the traffic.
You know, just stopped in and on the street.
It's just the nature of Portland for us.
We can move right over.
I don't understand what's happening.
So, we have a Q&A after this, as we always do.
You can ask questions at darkhorsesubmissions.com.
I'm not sure if Odyssey is working.
Zachary?
Okay, so we have chat live on Odyssey.
You can go to the same channel, Brett Weinstein, on Odyssey, that's O-D-Y-S-E-E, if you're watching live, or if you're not, but if you're watching live, you can join the chat there.
We have, I'm not going to talk a lot about it today, but my substack, Natural Selections, I wrote a piece this week on fraud.
It's called On Fraud and Being Science-ish.
And it is very much apropos of this moment, unfortunately, in time.
How is it that science has become so prone to having people who are willing to engage in fraud at basically being the voice of science?
It's beyond unfortunate and it's potentially going to take us all down.
So I encourage you to look at that if you have not seen it.
We are supported by our audience and we thank you for that.
We appreciate you subscribing to the channels, liking, sharing both the full episodes and the clips which you can find at Dark Horse Podcast Clips on YouTube, on Odyssey, and of course we're findable on all the podcast places and Spotify and everything.
Just a reminder that last summer, over a year ago at this point, YouTube demonetized us, even though they demonetized us for things about which now it is understood that we were right, and we're all along and just ahead of the mainstream curve.
It's funny they haven't revisited their claims about us, right?
As if the two things were really unrelated, whether we were right and whether we were Somehow unacceptable in their eyes for reasons that had nothing to do with us being correct.
Right.
Here's the thing.
We were right and we were careful and we didn't have to have been right to have not deserved to have been thrown off because such is the nature of good faith scientific inquiry that you will sometimes be wrong when you are investigating ideas.
And that is not a crime.
As it turns out, we were not wrong, but we are still demonetized.
So this is just a reminder that that happened and we appreciate you sharing the good word about what we are doing.
And of course, appreciate any other kinds of support that you can give if you can afford it.
On both of our Patreons, we have conversations monthly.
Tomorrow, Sunday, August 28th, it's going to be.
We have our monthly private Q&A.
The questions are already asked, but it's a small enough group that we actually engage the chat and they are able to answer questions that come up in real time.
That's starting at 11 a.m.
Pacific on Sunday, August 28th, which you can find at my Patreon.
And Brett has smaller-yet conversations on the first Saturdays and Sundays of every month, so those will be happening next week.
We encourage you to join us there.
You can also, at either of our Patreons, get access to our amazing Discord community, where there are conversations about difficult topics, you can join a book club, karaoke, virtual happy hour, and you never are at risk of cancelled for having an opinion that isn't shared widely by others.
You may get pushback, you may get disagreed with.
You could be lightly ridiculed.
Yes, and you may be wrong and you may be told so, and that is as it should be.
I'm not saying that I don't actually know to what degree any of that happens, especially the ridicule, but it's possible, right?
It's possible.
And it's everyone there whom we have talked to on the Discord community that you can access through either of our Patreons.
Reports it being just a really warm and welcoming community.
And in fact, they've got a camping trip planned around the equinox.
No, solstice.
No, equinox.
Sorry.
Yep.
I think the email I got maybe said solstice.
It's going to be the equinox.
Maybe I'm just making stuff up here.
But there's a camping trip planned with people who met there on the Discord.
You would want to pack differently for the solstice.
You would, but you'd have longer to do so.
Yes, true.
You'd definitely be able to get your ducks in a row.
Indeed.
Unless they've migrated south.
They probably will have migrated by then, in which case, but they've migrated in a row, or a V. Yeah.
Get your ducks in a V. That's actually a way better sentiment.
It is.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And of course, we have sponsors.
And as always, I will remind all of our regular listeners and tell any new listeners or viewers that we pick, we choose from among the sponsors who approach us very carefully and we only have sponsors whose products and services we actually vouch for.
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That's M-U-D slash backslash slash?
I never know which.
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Which one is that?
Is that a slash or a backslash?
Uh, that's a backslash.
That's a backslash.
Okay.
M-U-D backslash W-T-R.
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We'll have to amend the text.
The script, yes.
All right.
Here we are.
Here we are.
Can we start by talking about whether or not reality shall be tolerated?
Yes, I mean, as you point out, that's really the overarching question from here on until we either surrender and give in to the postmodern apocalypse or resurrect the concept that reality both exists and shall be something upon which we reach agreement through, you know, like a process of rationality.
Mm-hmm.
Use it as the basis for decisions, for instance.
Wow, wouldn't that be something?
Can you imagine governance based on reality?
Ugh, now you're dreaming.
Inferred through, you know, like science and things?
Yeah, I can.
I can, actually.
And I would like to insist on it, although I'm not sure my insisting- We're not in that position.
Yeah, we're not.
But we can recommend it.
They can't stop- well, they can stop us from doing that.
Yes, they can.
But so far, they have incompletely stopped us from recommending reality to your patients who chew gum.
Here we go.
I'm sure we're over in mystice and malinformation territory once again, recommending reality to help you with your everyday needs.
Once you see that solution set, it's kind of a big territory.
It is, it is.
So, I have three examples of reality not being tolerated here that we're going to talk about before we move on to the other things in the podcast today.
One from just some random anonymous account on the internet, on Twitter.
A rando.
A rando, if you will, which you will, and perhaps they will.
- I already did. - We have reality being denied by a rando, We have reality being denied by a rando, reality being denied by a magazine that purports to be spreading these scientific discoveries to lay people, and reality being denied by the actual scientific journals that are supposed to be the place where new scientific discoveries and reality being denied by the actual scientific journals that are supposed to be the place
And the tone changes between these three domains, as you might expect.
The Rando and the Scientific Journal don't sound exactly the same.
They don't use exactly the same language, but it is remarkable that all three of them are consistent in just denying what is true.
So here we go.
The Rando, as If you insist.
Here we go, Zach.
This is from Twitter.
This is from August 18th from an anonymous account at Queersing.
If bioconservatives manage to stop doctors from formally providing gender-affirming body modification to minors, underground alternatives will proliferate.
Younger folks yearn for morphological freedom, too, and will do what they can to live as they wish.
Hashtag DIY.
Hashtag trans liberation.
Now, morphological freedom is a new one on me.
And don't show my screen again here, Zach, but if you look at the bio for this account, you will perhaps not be surprised to learn that the first phrase in it is queer, transhumanist, anarchist.
So this is a very transhumanist approach, that we are somehow separate from our bodies, we can be more fully separated from our bodies, Our true being exists outside of the somatic existence of us, and all we need is more and better tech in order to realize this amazing dream.
For some it sounds utopian, for others of us it sounds dystopian, but regardless of what you think about it, it's just wrong.
Right, you know, we are our embodied experience.
We experience things through our bodies and from that develop the senses of what it is to think of the world and how to engage in it.
There is no separating us.
So this morphological freedom idea, which is very much downstream of transhumanism, is out of alignment with what is true, with the fact of some small number of billions of years of evolution in which we have been embodied.
Yeah, and you know, of course this drives you into, should a person be free to morphologically alter their body?
Well, certainly an adult person has some right to do this within reason, but it is also the case That we recognize that this desire may indeed be pathological and that it is not in our interest to facilitate it, right?
Whether that technical right still exists for an adult.
It is certainly our obligation to protect children from that impulse.
Take cutting, for example.
To the extent that people injure themselves, they have psychological reasons to do it, clearly.
But the point is, they may be doing something to control a different harm.
But nonetheless, the point is, this is a harm landscape.
And the idea that just because we phrase it, you know, as if it is just a simple extension of some principle, you know, do we believe in, you know, individual autonomy?
Well, certainly.
Well, how about morphological autonomy, right?
How about, you know, why would you deny it to children?
And it's like you're just being marched in the direction of, you know, actually endorsing harm.
And there's more, too, something that we've talked about here before, which is that trans being real but rare, and I actually know someone who did do a DIY surgery on themselves, because they had such extreme gender dysphoria.
And it is excruciating and tragic, and that does happen.
And that does happen.
However, the idea that modern, weird people have come up with an ability with high technology to modify bodies.
It does not mean that you have a basic human right to the very novel, very technological discoveries of the last some years.
Every moment, every discovery that moderns make does not immediately become a right, right?
And, you know, the idea of, you know, the fundamental human right to bodily autonomy is quite different from there being any fundamental human right to taking advantage of every newest possible technological or medical
Not innovation, like just treatment or surgery or procedure, especially given how off the rails it is, given how reductionist and uninterested in diagnosis and hyper-focused on dealing with symptoms it is, there's going to be a lot of disaster downstream.
Now, I agree with your point, of course, and we've talked about this before, that there is a large body of evidence that across many cultures there is a trans phenomenon of one type or another.
I'm not aware of any in which this involves surgical modification, but the point is we are in radical new territory when the point is, you know, I am trans and therefore I need to be physically modified or need to be physiologically modified.
with hormone treatments or blockers or whatever.
Yes.
And so the point is that's where this becomes a remarkable new argument.
This strikes me as the next phase of an arms race, right?
Because it's-- - It's a threat. - The basic point is, well, if you're going to say, well, trans is real, but it has never included the right to surgical modification, nor the necessity of it, right?
So if we want those modifications and the medical establishment decides that it cannot in good conscience deliver them, at least to people below a certain age, then we will avail ourselves of the right to modify our own bodies, which is, of course, as you point out, a threat.
You can't possibly be safe to do it, right?
Somebody who does not have the training to do this in a way that is biotically safe, that doesn't risk the possibility of damaging a blood vessel and bleeding out.
I mean, it's obviously extremely dangerous.
Well, I mean, self-surgery.
Yes.
It's insane.
Yes, even surgeons don't do it.
It's even more dangerous than cutting your own hair.
Really?
Yes.
Wow.
Substantially more so.
I know.
I will dredge up the research literature that explains why that is.
I look forward to seeing that.
The side-by-side comparison.
Right.
They weren't physically side-by-side, but in the paper, it's two charts.
I have now diverted this conversation into madness.
But yeah, it's a threat.
And the point is, of course, civilization has the right to say, your right to live as you wish to live is not tantamount to a right to surgical modification, certainly before you have attained adulthood.
And this is next phase, which is then we'll do it ourselves.
Yep.
And I mean, I guess before we move on to the next example, some things are just not available to you.
They're just not.
And just because you can imagine something or fantasize about it doesn't mean it can be or should be real or possible to you.
I'm reminded of the Rolling Stones.
Yes.
Right?
You can't always have what you want.
You can't always get what you want.
You can't always get what you want.
Right.
But if you try sometimes.
You might find.
You might find.
You can get what you need.
Yep.
Get in both cases.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's get.
I feel like, you know, they're before our time a bit, but wasn't that song that played at our high school graduation?
Keith Richards is timeless, maybe even physiologically, but The band, yes, before.
So they were classic rock at the point that we were in high school, but I believe it was that song that actually, was it that song that was played to our high school graduation?
Or is it a different Rolling Stones song?
No, it may well have been that one.
I think it was that one.
I've completely forgotten this, but.
You've blocked it, it was so traumatic for you.
Well, I was.
You were the speaker at our graduation.
Keeping an eye on OJ.
Who was also at our graduation.
Yes, he was.
He had already long since graduated.
But his daughter, anyway.
In any case, I've done it again.
Yes, you have.
Yes, you have.
Really, it wasn't so long ago that it felt like the advances from civil rights and women's rights and gay rights were happening.
We weren't there, but we were clearly moving in the right direction.
And we understood that there were trade-offs and that, frankly, you can't always get what you want.
But you try sometimes.
You might find.
You can get what you need.
I think it's you get what you, no, you can get what you need.
You're right.
I stepped all over your line.
Sorry about that.
You're much better with lyrics than I am.
I can't forget them.
They plague me.
But yeah, because some of them aren't great.
But anyway, I digress yet again.
I have now lost what I wanted to add to that discussion.
I have no sympathy for you.
I hoisted on my own petard in this case.
In this case, I have no sympathy for you.
In this case, yeah.
Yeah, I really don't have it.
Okay.
Oh, hello.
So next example.
We have cats are all over the place.
It's chaos here today.
Yeah, here we go.
Sorry for those of you listening, you must be wondering what the hell is going on.
Magazines that exist to disseminate scientific findings to the public, such as… Is Natural History still in existence, or did it disappear?
It used to be a great magazine, and then it went nuts even before everyone else went nuts, or it went uninteresting.
As far as I know, it's still… Okay, well, Natural History, Discover, Scientific American, these are… Omni?
Is that American?
Yeah, that was never as much in my world.
But those first three, we got those in my house when I was growing up.
And they were understood to be the ways that scientifically interested people can keep up on scientific findings either outside of their own fields if they're scientists or they're not scientists, but they're scientifically capable and interested and literate and want to know what's what.
Yeah, it was the popular presentation of actual scientific discovery.
Exactly.
And there was some controversial stuff, and there were things that you might disagree with because that's the way science works.
And there are also interpretations of things, you know, whether or not the finding turns out to be true or not, the interpretation of it may separately not be the right interpretation.
But Scientific American has, I mean, long since jumped all the sharks.
It feels like not that that's a thing.
But here, here we have, here I'll put up their tweet before actually, yeah, you can you can just put this, this is again, I picked this up from Twitter, where I quote tweet Scientific American, and what Scientific American has said is this, before the late 18th century, hopefully that's not playing.
Okay.
Before the late 18th century, Western science recognized only one sex, the male, and considered the female body an inferior version of it.
The shift historians call the two-sex model served mainly to reinforce gender and racial divisions by tying social status to the body.
True facts about the male So, what I said in response, which is an understatement, wherein a scientific publication forgets that reality exists whether or not humans perceive it accurately.
The idea that because science didn't understand everything about the universe at some point, There must not have been a reality then, and our confusion now can take precedence.
And we can use confusion from earlier to cement confusions now is truly backwards.
And I keep on coming back to the Fermi Paradox and thinking, like, this is it.
This is the kind of society-ending confusion that keeps us from ending up making contact with other conscious beings in the universe.
Because if this, then there's no amazing space exploration for us.
Like, we can't do it.
We can't do it if we think these things.
Right.
Yes, the colonizing of other planets will be much more difficult if we have not at least ensured that people from the two actual genuine sexes who are still of reproductive age have arrived in these places capable of producing offspring.
But I would just point out that even, you know, who amongst us does not in their own mind have Rock solid evidence that people have been aware of the sexual binary for two plus thousand years, right?
Two plus thousand, wow!
Okay.
Well, I'm just saying, if the idea that this was discovered in the 1880s... 18-somethings, I don't know.
Let's make it the 1880s.
Shall we?
Okay.
Something like the 1880s, right?
Like the 1880s, right?
The average person knows that the Old Testament, for example, contains a certain number of references to the two sexes, suggesting that people...
That far back already had become aware of this binary, right?
So how is it that scientific American, and really I think we need a new category because the purpose there is not to convince anybody of this, nor is this the product of anything that even rises to the level of a confusion, right?
The purpose of this is if you wish To deny the absolutely obvious and incontrovertible fact of two human sexes, then you're going to need something to work with.
In other words, there comes the point in the conversation where you wish to assert that there are not two sexes, and the person on the other side of the argument says, hopefully in a respectful way, you're completely full of shit.
And then you need to say the next thing, right?
About why you're not full of shit.
The purpose of this is to have that next thing in hand and to have it come from a respectable place like Scientific American, because then the person who has called you out for your garbage thinking is then back on their heels.
They may not have a next thing, in which case you win and there are no longer two sexes.
That's right.
That's right.
Because that's how reality works, guys.
That is how reality now works.
That's how reality works, and that's why we'll never meet aliens.
Wait, wait, wait.
That is how reality has always worked.
Now I need Scientific American to give me the piece that I say when you call me out for being full of shit.
I'm sure they're coming with it.
Well, no doubt.
I'm sure they will.
So, actually, this strikes me.
It hadn't occurred to me before, but during your brief tirade there, I thought about quadis.
And so Coatis, C-O-A-T-I, also known as Coatimundis, are a neotropical, that is to say, the tropics in the New World, in the Americas, procyonid, which is a relative of the raccoon.
They're gorgeous.
They're snouty, and they're brown, and they've got some stripes Further back, not as stripy as the raccoon.
No.
More brown, they're forest dwellers.
They climb okay, like raccoons climb okay.
And they're quite lovely.
I think the first time we ran into them, and you've actually got a picture of me sitting next to one, was in Monteverde in Costa Rica in the cloud forest on the first summer that we spent backpacking through Central America.
It was near the end of our trip.
But what we heard, I believe, on that trip for the first time, and we've heard it since, although because it hadn't occurred to me, I have not gone back and looked into the research here.
What we heard then was that when Western researchers were first discovering the Quatermundi, the Quatermundi presumably having long since discovered itself, as the original human inhabitants of these forests having long since discovered them.
But when Western science came in, it was like, aha!
I have found it.
Eureka, the Quatamundi.
It won't exist until it has a Latin name.
It won't exist until it has a Latin name, such is the nature of science and reality, apparently.
But no, when the Quatamundi was discovered, I don't know, this is maybe in the 1880s, you know, early 20th century, mid-20th century something, it was thought that there were two species.
Because one of them, which was, I don't remember, but I'm going to guess maybe a little bit larger body, was always seen singly.
And it was like, oh, wait, did you see it?
I think that was maybe called the quadi?
That was the quadi.
Quadi.
And then there were these aggregates.
There were these ones that always had little ones with them, and they had a lot of bigger ones, and they were called the mundis, I guess.
And as it turns out, the Mundis were the females with their babies, and they were social because often females with babies are, and the Quadis were the males that were solitary.
It's a polygynous mating system, and it all fits together now that we have a better understanding of mating systems and biology.
And no, that doesn't change the underlying reality about what Quadis or Quadimundis are, but it does mean that science got it wrong.
Science got it wrong, and then through an experiment in which they checked the junk of the Gwadis and Gwadamundis, they discovered their error.
Which, being procyonids, being raccoon relatives, was not too easy of a task.
Yeah, they got scratched up, no doubt.
Yeah, and boy, the NSF grant for that junk checking in Gwadis.
I think it had a different title, but anyway.
It's not the only story of this kind.
In fact, the elephant seal went through the same thing.
So there are two species of elephant seal, and I forget which one it was.
But the thing is that morphologically, elephant seals are so different.
Males and females are so different in size and also facial structure.
The males are even uglier than the females, which if you've ever seen a female elephant seal, you might find difficult to believe.
But no, take a look at a male, even uglier.
Yeah, a lot of resonating chamber.
Bulbous nasal stuff going on.
But anyway, they were understood to be different species until, again, a junk checking experiment revealed the truth.
I want to know what division of NSF that is, like where you apply for the NSF grant for junk checking.
It's right next door to navel gazing.
Oh, yeah.
Okay.
Yeah, and these departments are expanding.
They're taking over.
Yeah, apparently.
Taking over the whole NSF.
Oh, man.
Okay, so Scientific American has lost the plot.
The Internet randos, obviously, some of them started off without having the plot.
So okay, Scientific American has lost the plot.
They've not lost the plot.
They have plotted against the plot.
Oh, they're actively plotting against the plot.
Yes.
Okay.
But then also the scientific journals.
And we've talked about this a lot in other domains with regard to COVID-y stuff.
But here we go.
This is a slightly different topic.
Well, it includes the topic we were just on, but And it's an op-ed in the journal Nature Human Behavior.
So Nature being one of the two most prestigious scientific journals in the world, the scientific journals being the places that you, having done your own research, submit for publication.
So that's where the record of the research lives forever and ever and ever.
And nature and science are the two biggest ones, considered the most prestigious.
I don't think science has this, but nature has a bunch of sub-journals.
And so, you've got nature genetics, nature biotechnology, I think.
Nature human behavior is one of them.
It wasn't one of the ones I happened to have heard of, even though it's exactly in our wheelhouse.
But nature human behavior is one of them.
So, that fissioning began when we were in grad school.
Yeah, in the 90s-ish.
And it must have continued.
Yes, exactly, because I think Nature Genetics may have been one of the first.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
There were a few very prestigious ones, and apparently it worked, and so they've spun off a few more.
Exactly.
And so, it's a scientific journal under the umbrella of one of the two most prestigious scientific journals, but there's also always news stories as opposed to primary scientific findings being recorded and reported there.
And also some op-eds.
So this is an op-ed from the editors of Nature Human Behavior, who, remember, are effectively the gatekeepers of what shall get published in what amounts to one of the most prestigious places that you can get your Research published.
So I will link to this actual link in the show notes, but if you could take my screen off for a moment, Zach, so that I can just go to my PDF where I have some things highlighted.
Oh, where did it go?
Okay, so here we go.
Let me make it a little bit bigger so people can see it.
This is the same Nature Human Behavior op-ed published, I can't remember, just a few days ago, I think, in which Science Must Respect the Dignity and Rights of All Humans is the title.
Subtitle, New Ethics Guidance Addresses Potential Harms for Human Population Groups Who Do Not Participate in Research but May Be Harmed by Its Publication.
The very first sentence is, Although academic freedom is fundamental, it is not unbounded.
Just a few.
I recommend that you read this whole thing.
But let me just read the things I've highlighted and let's talk about them.
There is a fine balance between academic freedom and the protection of the dignity and rights of individuals and human groups, they attest.
Probably true, but, so, you don't have to write anything down, you can respond to that.
Well, I just wanted to point out that that initial assertion... Academic freedom is fundamental, but not unbounded.
Freedom is not unbounded.
Right.
That sounds so reasonable, and yet it ought to immediately set off alarm bells about what exactly they are about to steal from you in terms of rights that you had before that you don't have now.
At least they don't bury the lead.
It's a little cryptic, but they don't bury it.
It's right there.
Well, they don't bury it, but cryptic is the point, because really, I don't know.
At the point I read a sentence like that, I don't know if I need to immediately stand up and object and say that's where the bodies are going to be buried or if they're going to say something mundane like You're not allowed to murder people in your laboratory.
Academic freedom is fundamental, but it's not unbounded.
You can't murder people in your laboratory.
Well, I agree.
But does that mean there are things I can't say?
Does it mean that there are true things I can't say?
In which case, that's where the goddamn bodies are buried.
Yes, that's exactly right.
Okay, so again, I agree.
Okay, this is where the fact of Adobe being a little obnoxious.
There we go.
Okay.
Harms can arise as a direct result of the conduct of research.
Sure, of course.
Harms can also arise indirectly.
You can show my screen if you like, Zach.
Harms can also arise indirectly as a result of the publication of a research project or a piece of scholarly communication.
For instance, stigmatization of a vulnerable human group or potential use of the results of research for unintended purposes, e.g.
public policies that undermine human rights or misuse of information to threaten public health.
That's an extraordinary Half a paragraph as well.
They're now claiming.
That if someone abuses the research that you have done, you are in some ways accountable for their abuse of your findings.
Therefore, that is going to be their justification.
Implicitly mostly here, but partially explicitly.
That is going to be their justification for, therefore, we're going to save you from yourself here.
We're going to save you from doing any research which could possibly be misunderstood in any way by any nefarious actors.
Which of course means that's the end of research.
That's it.
We're done.
It's over.
Imagine the following.
Imagine a periodic table in which nitrogen has to be removed because knowledge about nitrogen is indeed prone to misuse.
It is.
That stuff is explosive.
You see what I'm saying?
Sodium also.
Get rid of that one.
What are they even talking about?
I see a very rapid shrinking of the periodic table given this logic.
Yeah, there's not going to be much left.
Not much left.
Yeah, it's hard to find an element that you couldn't abuse there.
An innocent element.
There are none?
Yeah.
No, I mean, if innocence means not only are you not guilty of harm, but you are not guilty of having been misunderstood to be guilty of harm.
Yes, I guess some of the transuranics are so vanishingly rare and last for such a tiny fraction of a second that maybe they are beyond use.
Is that what they're called, transuranics?
Yeah.
Well, there it is.
I didn't know that.
Learn something every three weeks.
Right above, just slightly larger than uranium?
Yeah, yeah.
But anyway, yeah, the periodic table is pretty much a goner.
There are maybe a few elements that we can keep, but most of them are going to be gone.
It was for a while.
It could be whoever used it anyway.
I'm not going to start naming names.
I'm certainly not going to try to spell them.
But in any case.
I'm sure Mendeleev was a racist or something.
Well, a lot of people had a lot of defects and a lot of other people have used their work.
And the problem is the two universes, a universe downstream of that paragraph.
Yeah.
That is, I mean, let's put it this way, this term will become important again on Dark Horse soon, but that is the fast track to a Dark Age.
If you are not allowed to study things that could be abused by others, right?
I mean, That is a completely unscientific universe.
There is no science in that universe, right?
Because who even knows?
Are you allowed to study things that you don't know if they could be abused until your work is done?
Well, you probably can't do that work either for the same reason.
Well, but it also completely puts all the power in the hands of anyone who wants to abuse anything.
Darwinism has been suffering this fate basically since Darwin.
Where the so-called social Darwinists, who stole the word, and now forever after, as evolutionary biologists who are actually trying to do good work, are accused of being eugenicists and racists and Nazis and all this.
It's like, that was an abuse of Darwinism!
I write about this actually in my fraud piece in Natural Selections this week.
The fact that someone used the word Darwinism and fundamentally misunderstood what the guy was on about isn't on us, isn't on the evolutionary biologists.
Just as the fact that some research could be abused by some, you know, idiot or asshole actually is not the responsibility of the person doing the research.
It's not.
It's not the responsibility of the person doing the research.
And here you have a journal in the family of journals that is one of the premier outlets for science in the world that has declared, if that paragraph stands, they have declared war on the idea of science.
And you're right, the extrapolation.
The paragraph, if it was applied fairly, ends science completely.
Sure.
What it will do instead is exactly what you point to, which is it will give the power to define what science has tolerated.
Yes.
It will leave that completely arbitrary power in the hands of those awful enough to wish to utilize that weapon so only the stuff, you know, the abuses they want will proceed and the abuses they or the legitimate uses will not.
That's right.
That's right.
Okay, another choice.
Another paragraph.
Another two paragraphs in this case.
It's not a long op-ed.
I could have just highlighted the whole thing.
But here we go.
You may show my screen if you like, Zach.
Regardless of content type, research, review, or opinion, and for research, regardless of whether a research project was reviewed and approved by an appropriate institutional ethics committee, Editors reserve the right to request modifications to, or correct or otherwise amend post-publication, and in severe cases refuse publication of, or retract post-publication, colon.
I'm going to keep reading here, but I don't care what is about to happen.
As it turns out, it's bad.
But I don't care what's about to happen.
Editors reserve the right to amend post-publication?
What?
Like, you submit your precious research to a journal, and it goes through peer review, and it goes through edits and edits and edits and edits, and it's published.
And the editors of this journal are saying, actually, we might change what it says that you said after it's published.
That's insane.
Let me read the next paragraph here.
And there's four points that they make.
I'm just going to read the first one.
So, the reasons by which they may, for instance, just change afterwards what they already published of yours includes.
Content that is premised upon the assumption of inherent biological, social, or cultural superiority or inferiority of one human group over another based on race, ethnicity, national or social origin, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, Now, there's a lot there, obviously.
Let's just pick the low-hanging fruit.
or are there socially constructed or socially relevant groupings hereafter referred to as socially constructed or socially relevant human groupings?
Now, there's a lot there, obviously.
Let's just pick the low-hanging fruit.
The low-hanging fruit, there's a lot of low-hanging fruit here, but one of them is content that is premised upon the assumption of social or cultural superiority or inferiority based on sex.
Okay.
Okay.
Women are better than men at seeing the details of situations, and men are better than women at seeing the gist.
I have talked about this before.
I have the paper on which that conclusion is based, and it's a sort of a forest for the trees and trees for the forest question.
This holds across a number of domains.
And it is also true, for instance, that on average, women are better than men in linguistic tasks, and on average, men are better than women in strictly mathematical tasks.
That's not to say that the best-living mathematician might not be a man, or the best-living author might not be, rather, that the best-living mathematician might not be a woman, or the best-living author might not be a man.
I am talking about average differences between groups.
This is what we do.
Okay, and some of what they're trying to do here is say your categories are wrong, your categories are lies, and some of the categories that science has used and that people have used in the past have been lies, have been wrong, are based on stereotypes that do not hold water.
But just to go out to the low-hanging fruit here, sex?
Again, Israel is not a creation of the Victorian-era scientists.
It is, in fact, real, and on average there are differences between us.
that are actually biological, social, and cultural, all of those things.
And the cultural and social differences will vary somewhat across, guess what, culture.
And the idea that we cannot talk about that and cannot do research into that, well, once again, end of science.
And furthermore, and then I'll let you talk, what's this journal called?
Nature Human Behavior Lawyers.
Like, that's the journal in which they say you cannot talk about biological, social, or cultural differences.
Or you're allowed to talk about differences as long as you claim, but it's all equally good no matter what.
We're all equally awesome.
We all get cold stars on our foreheads and we can all go over there and sit in the corner and frickin cry because we no longer have any reason to aspire to anything because we all think we're equally good as everyone else and therefore what's the point anyway?
I mean it also takes away the desire to actually aspire to things.
To imagine that you're equally good as everyone else already is and that's it, you're done.
So you have the editors at a premier outlet reserving the right to alter your work after it comes in or prevent the work from being published.
After it's published.
Right?
Yes.
But the point is, people who are not in academia will not understand the power of a top journal Basically saying what conclusions it's willing to publish not on the basis that other conclusions may not be right But on the basis that other conclusions could be abused right what they are doing is they're saying here are the conclusions that are acceptable here now a
Imagine, what does that mean over at, you know, whatever the proper subjournal of nature is where climate science happens?
Do they also have a policy that only science that pushes in the direction of policy modifications in which we address climate change will be published?
And in which case, on what basis do we say things like, X percent of scientists in climate science agree if the point is, well, there's this force that says, basically, you're not going to get very far in climate science if you don't agree, right?
It becomes circular.
And so in a circular world where you cannot talk about the superiority of men or women at different tasks where men and women are differently capable, what happens is you will then over time produce the phony scientific impression of similarity.
Which will then be used to counter the argument.
So, basically, this is a positive feedback.
Anybody who wishes to say, no, actually, men and women are different, they have different capabilities, and we know that, the evidence is clear.
Well, the evidence, actually, yes, the evidence used to be clear, but it has become increasingly clear that men and women are not different.
Why?
Because of editorial overreach at the journals.
Actually, and I had something else to say here, but that reminds me of the next two little things that I wanted to read from this, where they have working definitions adopted or adapted from the Sager guidelines and other sources.
I don't remember what.
Oh, Sager is sex and gender equity in research.
I didn't go down that rabbit hole.
I'm sure it's ugly.
Sex refers to currently understood biological differences.
Gender refers to socially constructed and enacted roles and behaviors which occur in a historical and cultural context and vary across societies over time.
Sex, well we currently understand this, but we all know that things change.
Gender, though, is this thing.
So they've got that reversed again.
Sex has been around for, you know, not very many billion of years.
And gender...
is the downstream effects of sex on your behavior and lots of organisms have gender and this gender identity crap that is now taking over is a totally made-up 21st century thing that has no bearing on anyone outside of well the entire planet and it's how we're going to dissolve because we've all Ugh, I'm done.
I'm done, like, oh my god!
So, you started with the low-hanging fruit, which I think is wise, right?
The sexes are different for a reason, right?
Selection made them different for a reason.
It's a division of labor issue, right?
And that doesn't mean it's good!
That doesn't mean it's great or fantastic or fun or wonderful, it's just true!
It's just true, and it means that it is squarely within the subject matter for legitimate science, right?
Yes we can talk about whether it's good or bad or whether there's something to be done to change things that are unfair about it because there are certainly some things that are unfair right but.
Yeah, there's a reason, for instance, that in academia, there is an active discussion about how to deal with the fact that, in general, the years during which you are most likely to be hardest at work doing research and building your lab are also the most likely to be your childbearing years, if you are a woman.
And tenure is on a clock.
And how do you stop the tenure clock or pause it or adjust it so as to both allow for the fact that women also have children when they choose to, but women also may want to be high-powered academics.
And you cannot disappear the fact that there is a trade-off there and that there's going to be a cost.
But there's an active, often good-faith discussion about how to do this, how to make it fair both to male academics who, even if they are active, active daddies, don't have to go through gestation and lactation.
Sorry, no male does.
But so that's the kind of conversation that we can have and that we should be having.
And hey, were having in the 80s and 90s and aughts about what the differences between the sexes and moving beyond regressive old expectations of gender roles means as we move forward into a world in which everyone has the ability to choose freely from among their options about what it is that they want to do with their lives right
and i mean in fact we've this is a demonstration that our ability to talk openly about this issue actually leads to solutions, right?
Because the fact is, academia has been democratized between the sexes.
It didn't start out that way, but if you look at the number of female PhDs graduating, it exceeds males, in the sciences at least.
In biology.
I don't think in the sciences across the board.
Certainly not in engineering.
In engineering, it's highly skewed.
We would expect it to remain.
We want to see a composite analysis.
MDs are biased towards women at this point.
Again, this old saw, which is based on research and which is true, is that on average, women are more interested in people and also organisms, and on average, men are more interested in things.
It means that men are more likely, given freedom of choice, to go into things like engineering and math and physics and chemistry, and women are more likely to go into medicine and biology of whole organisms.
All right, but suffice it to say, we have addressed this problem and we did so not by pretending that sex differences didn't exist, but by recognizing that they had implications for career tracks and by making reasonable changes.
Or was distributed in these departments.
In any case, I want to go slightly higher up the tree and pick some more difficult fruit.
Because this is done in a diabolical way.
Yes it is.
By taking what is obviously meant to imply Race and population and cultural differences.
They are smuggling in the ability to neutralize sex differences Sex differences are the easy one here, right?
What they're doing is they're saying if you Bulk at what we are asserting here, then you're probably a racist, right?
So the point is even sex in which this is such a slam-dunk that these differences exist and are not controversial In any circle where people are free to just simply see the obvious And the question is, well, what is the relationship?
And I want to point out, and I should tell you, I don't, I shouldn't have to explain what my position as a biologist is on genetic differences between populations, but I will because it's important for you to understand what I say next and what it does and doesn't imply.
I personally am not a big believer that significant differences in capacity between human groups are, in the present, largely based in genes.
I think the genetic contribution is little to none.
However, it is certain that differences have to have existed between groups in order for selection to have favored an overall increase in human capacity.
So, to the extent that human beings are an anomalously intelligent and capable species, that happened because human groups differed in capacity and selection favored the elaboration of human intelligence.
So, the idea That somewhere in the bulwark of the journal Nature, that they are going to declare war on the concept of differences between human groups means that we can no longer talk about how humans became so capable.
Right?
We cannot talk about the historical fact of differences between populations and the fact that we have all, every living human population, has benefited massively from the fact that selection apparently favored greater human intelligence over less human intelligence, or hominid intelligence.
Yep.
So, I mean, and the level of irony here of nature, human behavior, if you, why, you know, how many, there are 4,000-ish mammal species.
Why?
Heather's going to correct me to five splitters, lumpers, the whole bit.
There are four to 5,000 mammal species.
Why does one of them get its own journal under the umbrella of nature?
Yeah, where's nature kawati behavior?
Right, where is nature kawati and nature muskrat and all of that, right?
It's human behavior that gets its own journal.
Why is that?
That's because humans are really unusual.
How did they get unusual if there was not selection between human ancestral populations in which selection favored the unusual traits that justify a special journal of nature?
How could that be?
That's right.
So I guess I'm going to go back down the tree a little bit to easy, easy hanging fruit.
But based on what you just said, remember that it reads, content that is premised upon the assumption of inherent biological, social, or cultural superiority or inferiority of one group over another.
Now, again, I wasn't prepared for this, but there are some groups of humans, some particular unique populations of humans, which qualifies as a human group, who engage in cannibalism.
And that is a cultural trait that they engage in.
And I am here to tell you that I believe that that is an inferior practice to that which the rest of us do, which is not engaging in cannibalism.
You are going to risk our channel on the claim that cannibals are worse.
That is an inferior cultural trait to not being a cannibal.
And that right there is something that I guess if I claimed in a publication, in a paper that got accepted by Nature Human Behavior, they would have the right to go in afterwards and correct my claim and say, actually, cannibalism, it has its advantages.
It's fine.
At the very least, we can't say that it's any worse than not being a cannibal.
Okay, I think this is a lovely challenge.
But what about the case, what suppose I wanted to publish a paper in Nature Human Behavior, in which I discussed the effect on the carrying capacity of a given habitat under hunting and gathering versus farming.
And I was to point out that the farming population on the same patch of territory was, you know, 10 times the size of what was sustained under It allows for a higher population density.
Am I allowed to argue that that would be evolutionarily superior?
Am I allowed to notice if farming populations have driven out hunting populations or caused them to embrace farming in history?
Are we allowed to have that conversation?
Right.
Evolutionarily superior, made more of itself, right?
And superior for the people who are the hunter-gatherers, no worse for them.
Superior for the land in which the farming took place, not necessarily.
And once we're talking about monocropping and Big Ed, definitely not worse.
I mean, definitely not better, much, much worse.
But produces more of the people that the thing was created to produce, Yeah.
So success, better at the thing, doesn't address the, but was the thing itself desirable?
No, actually, maybe we don't want to be facilitating producing more and more and more of ourselves, right?
So I mean, that like, just the idea of like, what is superior?
What is inferior?
Like, what is the goal?
And is the goal itself honorable or something that we want to be engaged in?
We need to be able to have every single level of this conversation.
You need to be able to say, actually, low-intensive, multi-crop, swidden agriculture allows for more people to be maintained on a piece of land than does hunter-gathering.
And big ag monocropping agriculture in the short term, especially with the nitrogen-fixing chemicals that were created in the early 20th century and are now being added a lot to the land, allows for even more people to persist.
But at what cost?
All these downstream effects, all of which are externalities, none of which are being added into the equation.
The intermediate agricultural, and there are lots of ranges of approaches to agriculturing the land, that's not the way you say it, will produce more people than hunter-gathering, but How honorable is it, and how valuable is it to humanity long term, that we simply decide that more people is success and therefore better, and we're going to let the hunter-gatherers disappear?
That's also not good.
It's not an honorable decision to have made, but if we're prevented from talking about which kind of way of being makes more, makes less.
If we can't make any judgments at all, we can't have the conversations.
We're done with the conversation.
Are we allowed under this rubric to talk about the fact that Europeans who traveled to the New World had superior immunity to smallpox because the New World populations... Because they came from the land of smallpox?
Because they came from a land in which people had close association with, uh, they had animal husbandry because the animals that were capable of being domesticated are highly concentrated in the old world and that there was only one large mammal.
In a position to be domesticated in the new world.
Are we allowed to have that?
I mean, even if... Yeah, no, I mean, it's occurred to me, like, this is the cancellation of Jared Diamond, too.
Right, Jared Diamond... Guns, germs, and steel, no way, no how.
Right, which is, if you want to be liberated from the idea that the reason that the populations that have power today are in power is that they were genetically superior, the key to unhooking that idea is Jared Diamond.
Understanding that what was uneven was the distribution of opportunities to do things like domesticate.
And the accident of the major geographic axis on which the continent that you were on went.
Absolutely, which then shows you exactly why Europeans were so successful At driving out native populations in the Americas and so unsuccessful when they tried to move north through Africa.
The orientation of the continents reversed the tables on the germs.
So, reversed the tables on the germs and the domesticated crops that they brought with them.
So the point is, if you want the antidote to the racist bullshit, you need the science to be done completely.
And you need to, you know, biological, social, and cultural.
Really, none of that.
We're not allowed to talk about any of that anymore.
What you're left with is exactly what you're talking about.
You're opening the door wide to the actual racists.
You know, the actual people who have no clue what is going on and are looking for an excuse to be terrible to one another.
That's what we are doing here.
Even worse.
I mean, that is exactly what we were doing at a power level, but even worse, right?
Human behavior, there are two ways you could study it, right?
You could study it in a Darwinian framework, which, yes, is going to tell you some things you don't want to know.
It's also going to give you the keys to making history fair, right?
Or you can study it in an anti-Darwinian framework, in which differences in capacity are not allowed to be discussed.
In which case, you are inviting the pre-Darwinian world.
All of the things that existed in that pre-Darwinian world, the belief in inherent superiority that was not challenged by science, that's the world you're inviting back.
Yes.
And the fact that it would happen at Nature, right?
To have the journal Nature Human Behavior take up arms against the Darwinian study of human behavior is mind-blowing.
It's mind-blowing.
Two last little quotes from this.
Again, this is the op-ed published in Nature Human Behavior this week, explaining why science is off.
That's not their understanding of what they've done.
Gender identity, an individual's conception of self as being a man, woman, masculine, feminine, non-binary, ambivalent, etc., based in part on physical, psychological, and social factors.
No, wait, that was a definition.
That wasn't a complete sentence.
That's why that read that way.
It is the internal experience of a gender role.
There was a broad range of gender identities, including but not limited to.
You ready?
Oh, yeah.
There's a broad range of gender identities, including but not limited to Transgender, Genderqueer, Genderfluid, Nonbinary, Gendervariant, Genderless, Agender, Nongender, Bigender, Transman, Transwoman, Transmasculine, Transfeminine, and Cisgender.
Holy moly.
And then, two paragraphs down, they say, Researchers are encouraged to promote equality between men and women in their academic research, which by nature should be grounded on the recognition of merit, competences, and creativity, regardless of any other personal attributes or orientation.
Well, if they're going to divide the spoils between men and women, where does that leave the gender-fluid people?
I don't know, or the agender, or the non-gender, or the genderqueer, or the NBs?
I mean, I'm actually glad that's in there.
Because the language beforehand, if you don't know how science is supposed to work and what they're actually saying and what it would do to actual science, right?
It's a little subtle.
It's a little subtle.
That's what we're here for.
We're trying to reveal it as not being subtle, but yeah.
You could have an am I misreading this response until you get to that business.
And then it's like, oh, I get it.
This is just some sort of ideological polemic.
And this is no longer a scientific journal, get it.
You captured it.
Yep.
Enjoy it.
Enjoy it until you bring it to the ground, which you're in the process of doing.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, let's let's take, let's take the functional things in society, take them over, and destroy them.
And then look for more things to take over and destroy.
But you know what, they're not going to last forever.
There's not an infinite amount of successful actual systems, because you're destroying them too fast.
Okay, but then next phase.
We are about to discover what you and I already suspect, which is that our field doesn't exist in any meaningful form anymore.
Our field being broadly evolutionary biology?
Evolutionary biology and human behavior.
Is our field going to come together and say that Nature Human Behavior is effectively no longer a scientific journal and should not be taken seriously?
Because that's the obviously right response here.
Or are they going to continue to publish there and put it on their CVs proudly?
And I don't know what the name for this behavior is, the cowardice that causes you when somebody is powerful not to call out their destruction of things that you consider to be fundamental.
But if that is what happens here, then it will effectively tell you, you can safely ignore this field because Yep.
They did us a favor.
They published that editorial in a place that we can read it.
But where else do these beliefs have an important editorial role?
What are they adjusting about what it is you're reading in the journals?
Yes.
Well, and that's why, you know, that's why I organized this the way I did.
We started with the Internet rando, and we went to the Scientific American, you know, the magazine that is supposed to be disseminating a comprehensible version of new science to people who are smart but not scientifically Precise.
I can't think of the right word, but like not professionals within science.
And then the scientific journals.
And it's, like I said, like I said up front, the language sounds different.
You know, these guys, nature, human behavior is not talking about morphological freedom yet.
But it's all the same stuff.
It's certainly opening the door to it.
It's all the same stuff.
It's utterly insane across the board.
And the fact is that you don't have to squint very hard to say, actually, Internet Rando and the most prestigious scientific journal are sounding a lot like one another here.
And they're All wrong.
They're pretending that reality doesn't exist, and imagining that by doing so, they will change what reality is.
And it doesn't work that way.
It doesn't work that way.
Yeah.
Another way to say it is that you have an ideology Asserting its conclusions, its baseless conclusions, and it is doing it now.
It is so powerful that it is doing it at every level.
So that if you are an internet rando yourself, you can go, you know, tweet back at it on Twitter.
And if you're a, you know, an academic, you know, who views yourself as an important part of What makes humanity civilized, then you get your version of it dressed up in the proper language for that.
But the point is, there's no difference in the rigor of that essay versus the Internet rando.
They're exactly equivalent in terms of their utility as, you know, their insightfulness.
It's not insight, it's the assertion of an ideological position dressed up as the conclusion of sober people thinking carefully about issues.
That's exactly right.
That's exactly right.
So that's reality for you.
There are a number of things, we've been going at it for a long time already, there are a number of other things that we thought about talking about.
I don't know if you want to do that.
Maybe we should save that.
Maybe we should save it.
Okay, all of them?
Well, we don't have to save all of them.
Yeah, let's do a little bit here.
I don't know if you want to do that.
Unfortunately, I wouldn't have my binoculars to know.
Oh, okay.
So why don't you think about that while we talk a little bit first about tennis.
Yeah, there you go.
Tennis.
The US Open, which is one of the four biggest tennis tournaments, starts on Monday.
Most of our listeners, I assume, don't care about tennis, but it's an awesome sport, and it happens to be one that my parents both played, and I played a little bit when I was a kid.
So it was the one sport that, whenever the US Open, the Australian Open, the French Open, or Wimbledon, which are the four Grand Slam tournaments.
We're on.
We would have that on the television for those week and a half, two weeks that they were on.
And in fact, I think my parents went to at least one of them, one of the US Opens, which is always, it overlaps Labor Day in, what is it?
It's like Flushing Meadows, but I feel like that's a race.
That's a horse race.
Anyway, somewhere in New York.
And Novak Djokovic, who is sort of vying along with Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer for like, you know, which one of these guys is maybe the best male tennis player ever?
I don't know if that editorial permits you to do that.
Luckily, I'm not submitting this editorial to Nature Human Behavior.
Oh, okay.
Then do go on.
Yes, do go on.
And in fact, you know, I said male.
I was like, well, I don't have to say male because as—we're not going to go here, really.
If they are the best male tennis player ever, then they are the best tennis player ever.
And that's not to say I played tennis.
I haven't played in forever.
But you know, there has been some extraordinary female tennis, women's tennis out there.
But the best male tennis player is better than the best female tennis player.
Story, end of story, done.
For now.
Oh?
Well, if you think about it.
All right, suppose, let's just hypothetically speak.
Okay, here we go.
The best male tennis player is, you know, Larry Jim Bob, you know, in some hypothetical future situation.
And suppose he becomes Nadine instead of Larry.
Now he can be the best female tennis player and he will now be able to beat the best male tennis player, whoever it was that he had initially.
Well, in your ridiculous scenario, though, I do think that although once having gone through puberty as a male, you cannot undo the benefits of that male puberty, but the act of hormonal and certainly surgical transition actually does render you somewhat less capable.
So this is not an argument for anyone who's decided that they're the sex that they're not to be able to play with that sex, but it is suggestive that a top-notch male player who transitioned might not still be able to beat the other top-notch male players, and of course it's telling.
That you don't have men at the top of their game transitioning.
You have men who are middling and can't win transitioning and then beating all the women because that's what gross men would want to do.
Like, that's not sportsmanlike.
There's nothing honorable in this.
But, you know, elite male athletes don't transition.
Right.
No, I agree.
And my setup was, of course, absurd.
But my real point is, You are throwing out rules that open the door to every conceivable skullduggery and to the inability to say perfectly clear things.
Is the world threatened by the fact that the best male tennis player is going to permanently be better than the best female tennis player for morphological reasons among others that nobody chose?
I don't think so.
But the point is, if we can't even talk about it, because We are going to be forced to embrace the idea that, you know, trans women are women and therefore a male tennis player who transitioned to female and upended the very clear distinction between the quality of play at the top of males and female tennis, right?
We are going to lose the ability to even discuss what is true, which is then going to further open the door for more madness.
Yeah.
Okay, so, but Jokovic is not having trouble because there's anything about trans anywhere in his life, so far as I'm concerned.
Sure.
Not so far as I know.
I don't, I have no idea.
He's, you know, he's a, he's a character.
You know, before COVID, I definitely knew people back, especially, so Federer is 40, and he didn't play, I think, in Wimbledon this year, because he had knee surgery or surgeries, but he's still, like, he's not retired.
So, I mean, and all these guys, I think, are in their mid-late 30s, like, all The other two that we're talking about, Nadal and Djokovic, and they are all awesome.
And many people find, you know, watching Federer play, he's just beautiful.
And Nadal is powerful and elegant, but it's a different kind of play.
And then Djokovic's personality grates on people, which shouldn't affect whether or not you love to watch him play.
But there are some people who sort of, you know, were rooting for, you know, Federer to get the most Grand Slam titles.
Or Nadal, and there are presumably Yokovich devotees, but there were fewer of them because he's just he's a little bit more of a brash personality.
COVID happens, and he becomes one of them dirty unvaccinated types.
Becomes by changing nothing about what he was doing.
Right.
By saying, no thank you, I'm healthy, I'm good, and also, oh by the way, I don't know if he said this, but like, oh by the way, elite male athletes seem to be not doing so well at some level with these things, and I don't need one.
Earlier this year that meant that the Australia Open, which was already in country I think, said actually you're not allowed to play, we're deporting you or we're taking away your visa or whatever.
I think they locked him up briefly.
They quarantined him even though there was no evidence of his being sick.
And then they kicked him out and this is, you know, I think he and Nadal and Federer are all like neck and neck for the number of Grand Slam titles they'll get.
Okay, that was one that he just had no access to.
And now the U.S.
isn't allowing him to come play in the U.S.
Open, even though
Finally, some of the stupid narrative around COVID vaccines is unraveling, and there are going to be unvaccinated people in the stands watching, and unvaccinated people, at least citizens, can freely come and go from the U.S., and the president of the country who is presumably ultimately responsible for this decision is quadruple-vaxxed and has been on Pax Lova and all of the best, best, best stuff, and he's gotten COVID twice because that's how protective these insane so-called treatments are.
And so what is this?
Who is this protecting?
So unfortunately, you know, if what this results in is Nadal, awesome, amazing athlete that he is, ends up at the most Grand Slam titles of any man, there's forever, ever, ever an asterisk after his name.
It's not his fault.
It's not Jokowicz's fault.
It's not.
Because Jokowicz not taking one of these stupid treatments into his arm is not responsible for the arbitrary authoritarian decision of supposedly democratic governments.
Yeah, I think it's even worse.
There is a way in which there has been a fervor to transfect people with these agents that has, to many of us, suggested a desire to do away with Anyone against whom to compare the health of people who have had these treatments.
The control group is small.
Right.
Eliminating the control group has been one of very few obvious explanations for the level of fervor for reaching everybody.
And in this case, I hate to say this, but the people who are playing in these tournaments apparently did get transfected.
And given the nature of the danger, especially of the mRNA versions of these transfection agents, it is not impossible that there would be some subclinical damage in some, or depending on the pharmacokinetics of these things, multiple.
And so the question is, if you're going to prevent the pattern from being provable, Again, you have to intervene somewhere else.
It's rather a lot like nature, human behavior, taking up arms against the idea that something might be better than something else in the realm of humans.
You know, you don't very well want tennis players free not to take these treatments and then to see a competition, an athletic competition between people who did and people who didn't.
You might be, you know, if you had enough variation, you might actually be able to see something.
I hate living in that world.
It's terrible.
But we didn't create it.
We didn't create it.
And what's more, our worst fears about what was causing the conversation to go the way that it did as these things were actively being pushed.
I mean, they're still being pushed weirdly, but as they were so actively being pushed.
You know, we now know that there was an army of people hired to shape conversation online, right?
That these were paid shills.
We suspected there were paid shills, but we now just, this is just a simple fact.
And so in any case.
I do think we have to worry about things as troubling as are they trying to deny us the evidence that would become apparent if we were simply able to go from here and watch the world unfold the way it would and be able to compare people who made different decisions and just see what happened to them.
There shall be no comparison or investigation or testing of hypotheses that we find unsavory.
Right, exactly.
And this is unsavory for a different reason.
This is unsavory for, you know, pharma capture corruption reasons.
And just to be clear, again, this hypothesis sounds plausible by many rubrics, but promoting a hypothesis, proposing a hypothesis, is not saying, I believe that thing is true.
Proposing hypotheses is what scientists do.
It's what we do.
We therefore, in seeing a pattern and making an observation, it is our job to come up with all of the possible explanations for why that pattern or that observation might exist.
It is our job to come up with all of them.
If this hypothesis wasn't being proposed here, given that it is a possibility, that would be an indication that something is awry, right?
So every time a hypothesis is proposed and some freaking internet rando says, aha, conspiracy theorist, that is a demonstration that that internet rando, like most people apparently, don't know what science is or how it's done.
The proposing of a hypothesis is necessary to the doing of science.
They may not even be a rando.
That's what we now know.
They may be posing as a rando.
Or they might not be posing as a rando.
There are a lot of people who are not randos on the internet making crazy claims about, look at all these conspiracy theorists out there, when they really ought to know better.
That actually proposing hypotheses is what scientists do, and shutting down conversation and shutting down the idea of what might be possible is what crazy people who want the end of democracy Yeah, I mean, you know, I'm proud that we coined the term medically woke because the point is we are now able to see out in broad daylight that this is just a different version of the authoritarianism with a different target, right?
It's the same toolkit, right?
You will not be able to say these things.
If we find you even thinking them, terrible things will happen to you.
So don't think them.
And you know, in this case, it's a physiological topic rather than a moral one.
But in any case, I did also want to point out, though, you know, I don't follow tennis.
I, of course, what little I've encountered it, I have certainly heard, you know, the assertions that Djokovic is, you know, Unlikable or something along these lines.
I now feel very differently about this, right?
My sense is, oh, he's disagreeable, right?
That's the word.
He's disagreeable.
And he has done something important here.
He's become, he's not only a historical figure in tennis, he is now actually a historical figure for taking a stand in this context where Where others have not.
And, you know, yeah, I do feel bad that, you know, Nadal, for example, if he, you know, achieves the maximum Grand Slam wins, will have the asterisk.
But that is a tiny, tiny price compared to having somebody in a different milieu where we haven't seen a lot of courage on this front.
Stand up and say, actually, I will accept the cost to my historical significance in tennis to do what I believe is the right thing here in terms of my health, right?
And many more people should be making that decision.
Indeed.
That's right.
Are we there?
Or do you want to pick up one of these other topics?
No, I think we're probably there.
I guess I did want to say one last thing, which is that the problem here is that now One has to have one of two views about what's going on in tennis, right?
Either, is it Jokovic?
Jokovic, yeah.
Either Jokovic is a troublemaker who, you know, isn't doing his part to protect people from COVID by getting his vaccination and he's being punished by, you know, the powers that be because what we need is compliance.
Or he's a hero who is standing up to those powers in spite of the fact that it may cost him a piece of his legacy in tennis.
And I would just point out that it is odd that they have turned tennis into a team sport.
Oh, yes.
Yeah.
It's a very troubling phenomenon.
But increasingly, I think we just need to look at this.
Oh, and actually, there's another example of this out today.
I don't know if you encountered it.
Did you see the story about the Mar-a-Lago search?
I did not.
Well, I mean, I know that that happened.
Right, but something emerged today.
Okay.
Yes.
In the New York Times, at the very least, the strong implication emerged.
It's a two-part implication.
The implication is that Trump took- This is as reported in the New York Times?
Yes.
Okay.
That the warrant was apparently in part motivated by This is the claim of the New York Times.
I am saying one way or the other.
The claim is that Trump took documents that contained information about confidential informants to our intelligence apparatus, and separately, that confidential informants to our intelligence apparatus have been killed, compromised, or captured at an anomalous rate.
Since Trump left office.
Something, something.
Something, something, something.
This is a pattern that has been noticed in intelligence circles.
Why are they being compromised at an anomalous rate?
The assertion that Trump took documents that contains relevant information and the therefore connected dots implication is that he may have handed that information over to people that's getting these people killed.
Now, I want to point something out about this.
Somebody is engaged in treason.
Could be Trump, but that seems really unlikely here, right?
Because it's obvious treason to hand over information on confidential informants that are important to the U.S.
intelligence apparatus.
If informants are truly being compromised, killed, whatever, etc., at an anomalous rate, if it truly is anomalous, then a breach has happened.
And wherever that breach was, that was a treasonous breach.
No, no, no.
We got two candidates here.
One candidate is Trump and the extraordinary idea that a president would have left office, taken those documents, hand them over to people, knowing that that would result in things happening to those informants in the field, right?
I wonder about motive here.
That would obviously, irrespective, even if he had the motive, right?
I do put this past Trump.
I would not imagine him leaving office, right?
Especially hoping to return to office, compromising American informants abroad.
So, Either he did that, which the New York Times certainly wants us to wonder about.
Or someone else did it.
Or the New York Times is engaged in treason and alleging so.
That's the point.
If you are a journalistic establishment that on the basis of Extremely weak circumstantial evidence is going to raise this allegation about a former president, right?
You are engaged in a betrayal of the nation at an extreme level.
I would have to read the article.
So you haven't even shown me the article here.
So let's just at least put it up so people know what we're talking about.
I sent you a screenshot.
Maybe it's not worth it.
He's gonna have to go find it.
From your description of what's in the article, I don't have a clear enough understanding of what has been seen, of what the justification for the, I'm missing all the right legal words here, but of the raid.
The raid, yeah.
If there's a document that is in the public domain or that the New York Times has shared the relevant parts of that I think I can't make sense of that.
There's a screenshot of a title of an article on the screen.
You are claiming something that seems to me maybe, but I haven't heard anything yet that convinces me of that.
Well, I mean, I think you can certainly say, assuming the following is true, either the New York Times came out with evidence today that Trump compromised informants to the American intelligence establishment in a way that got them or likely got them killed.
Either they present that evidence, Or if they do not present that evidence, then alleging such a thing or placing those dots so that they will be connected about a former president without that evidence is Well, how would it, so if that, which again, you threw this at me, I've never heard of this before, like two minutes ago, five minutes ago, something.
But even if the latter, what they're doing is egregious against a former president, but is that treason?
I believe so.
So the problem is that this is obviously somebody who's eligible to be reelected today.
But, you know, slandering citizens is not treason.
Slandering former presidents who are eligible to be re-elected, I believe, is tantamount to it if it is not based on evidence.
I mean, if it's slander.
I just don't have any of the information in front of me.
All right.
So, you know, I've said what I have to say here.
I'm not convinced, but I don't know.
Like, you can show me what you've seen, and then perhaps we can come back to it, or hopefully not.
Or perhaps the New York Times will put its foot more clearly in its mouth at another point.
Well, I will say, you don't have to respond to it, but I will say.
Journalistic ethics would require the New York Times to behave very, very carefully in light of this possibility and what they have done.
What possibility?
The possibility that a former president has compromised confidential informants of the US intelligence apparatus in such a way that has gotten them killed.
Were that possible, the right journalistic thing to do would be to go very slow, not put it into public, attempt to find that information rather than report on it willy nilly, right?
Connecting those dots or placing those dots so that they will be connected is, um, a political act, a political act in a highly charged context.
And this wasn't in the opinion pages.
This is in the news section.
Yeah.
And that I mean, that's that's something we haven't really talked about.
The Nature of Human Behavior op-ed that we've spent so much time talking about today is labeled an op-ed, but an op-ed at Nature is... So, a scientific journal is different from a newspaper in a lot of ways, right?
A newspaper has a news team and it's separate from its editorial team.
And the editorial team both writes some editorial pieces, but also solicits editorials from other people.
And the news team is separate.
There's like a firewall between them, right?
And that is as it needs to be because the editorial pages of the newspaper doesn't make the newspaper.
The news is over in the news part.
Whereas a scientific journal like Nature Human Behavior has scientific papers in it.
And it also has editorials sometimes and news sometimes, but it's all the same people.
There is no expectation of firewall.
There is no presumption of or expectation of firewall.
So it's the editors Who are doing the first pass on the scientific papers that come in.
Do I just reject out of hand?
Do I send to peer review?
And if peer review, which peer reviewers do I send it to?
It's the same editors who wrote this op-ed.
So there's no firewall there.
And I mean, this actually is, I think, important too, in terms of like, what are we seeing in terms of the breakdown of Our institutions and our organizations.
Scientific journals and newspapers aren't the same.
They aren't structured in the same way.
You can't have the same expectations of them.
But one thing that is true is if this article that you're talking about, that I've barely seen a headline for, was published in the New York Times in the opinion pages, they can do whatever they want.
But the standards are different when they are publishing it in the news division.
I mean, there are three tiers.
You've got the news division, you've got a New York Times editorial, and then you've got op-eds by columnists, and the standards would be different for all of those.
Well, but there's two divisions.
The op-eds written by the editorial staff at the New York Times, and the op-eds written by people from the outside, which are solicited by the editorial staff, or you can also Yeah, I agree.
call is not the right word.
You also submit and maybe you can accept, maybe you don't.
But that's all sort of in-house in the editorial wing.
And then the news wing is different.
Yeah.
I agree.
The statement that they can do whatever they want is obviously too strong because- It's a little too strong, but under the auspices of this is our opinion, they're allowed to do a lot more.
They have more- And part of what you're saying is there's a news article.
There's an article that is purporting to be news, that is reporting the news.
All the news that is fit to print, I believe, is the New York Times logo or motto, rather.
And if they reliably print All the news that fits their ideology that is fit to print, and not all the news that doesn't fit their ideology that is fit to print, then they have fallen down on their journalistic standards and they aren't doing journalism anymore.
Right.
I'm saying something more, which is that if they are attempting to create the impression that a former president has committed treason, and it is not based on actual evidence, it is based on the juxtaposition of facts that do not have a relationship to each other.
Right, then what is it to allege treason or to create the impression of treason artificially by juxtaposing those objects in your, you know, news pages, right?
And my point is, That that is an egregious breach in the context, especially of a person who is eligible to run for office.
That that is an exotic intervention into a political discussion masquerading as an evidentiary claim.
All right.
Anything else?
I think that's it.
Okay.
Well, we are going to do a Q&A, as we do most weeks.
We will take about a 15-minute break and come back.
You can ask questions at darkhorsesubmissions.com.
You can also, if you want a longer and more intimate Q&A with us tomorrow, where we actually can engage the chat, you can find that by going to my Patreon and joining there.
And Brett also has a couple of conversations coming up on his Patreon.
We encourage you to join us there.
You can, if you have any logistical questions like, hey I've got a card I want to send them, which we get some cool mail, you can either go to either websites and find an address or email darkhorsemoderator at gmail.com for logistical questions.
But it's darkhorsesubmissions.com for the questions for the Q&A.
Lots else to say, but maybe we'll sign off with, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
