Are We Living in a Dark Age? Bret Speaks with Steve Patterson
Bret Speaks with Steve Patterson on the subject of today’s world and what we face as time progresses. Some of us have begun to wonder, given the vast array of unscientific beliefs that recently echoed across civilization, are we entering a cryptic dark age? Might we be living in one already? Steve Patterson, a philosopher and independent researcher, has reached an even more unsettling conclusion. Despite the remarkable pace of technological progress, we have lived our entire lives in the scie...
Is it possible, let's say that we're entertaining a theory in which there's physical stuff, maybe conscious states are in a separate, some kind of a separate system, obviously they're related, and then there's an abstract system, maybe that's where the laws of physics resides or something.
Can, is there, are each of these equally fundamental?
So is it possible that we could dispense with the abstract stuff?
It might be, it might be like, there's a theory here.
I think it's called, what is it called?
I forget what it's called, but it's something like, you know, the laws of physics are ideas So maybe all we have is, you know, physical stuff and mental stuff.
And, you know, the mental is more fundamental and you don't need the abstract stuff.
Can you dispose with the physical stuff?
Well, I actually think you can.
I think it's conceivably possible to tell the idealist story, which says that everything is mental.
Everything is an experience.
Everything is an idea.
I don't take that position, but it's at least conceivably possible that the most basic story we tell about the physical world is wrong.
Is it possible to dispense with the existence of consciousness and conscious mental states?
I would say no.
There's no true story that we could tell that is possibly true in which our conclusion is consciousness doesn't exist.
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast.
I have the great pleasure of sitting today with Steve Patterson, who you may well not know, but you can find him at steve-patterson.com.
You may also want to check out his podcast, which is called Patterson in Pursuit.
Am I correct about that, Steve?
Indeed.
Yep.
Well, welcome to Dark Horse.
Hey, thanks for having me.
So you are an independent philosopher, which, uh, Independent and philosopher would both be pursuing as terms here, but let's just say that's a fascinating category to me.
I take philosophy very seriously as a tool for getting logic correct, and I also find the idea of someone doing this independently very tantalizing.
I will say for my audience's benefit, I became aware of you when I read an essay that you wrote recently on a topic that is near and dear to my heart.
You wrote about the question of whether or not we are in a dark age, and I don't know how long I have been arguing that we are in a dark age.
I know that when I searched my Twitter feed that my references to it go back to 2009 when I signed up for Twitter, so it goes back at least that far.
But in any case, it's a claim that I have made to people, and mostly I get blank stares.
How could this possibly be a dark age, given all of the marvelous technology around us, the appearance that we are so scientific?
So, in any case, I was fascinated by your essay, and I felt it was important that we talk about this very interesting topic.
Great, I can't wait.
Thanks for inviting me on.
This is also a topic near and dear to my heart.
For what it's worth, I'll give you the brief story here.
So, I was interested many years ago, and I started my intellectual journey in political theory and economics.
It seems very far away from philosophy.
But I realized after a few years of researching political theory that a lot of my assumptions were coming from the domain of economics.
And then after studying economics, I realized there were questions in the methodology of economics that I found really, really important.
Like, there are different ways to come to economic Conclusions.
You could go out in the world, you can make a bunch of testable predictions, and maybe you figure out how the world works economically that way.
Maybe you sit in an armchair and make deductions.
Maybe that's the right approach to figure out economic knowledge.
I realize questions of economic methodology are really philosophy.
It's really just the epistemology of economics.
And then, that sucked me into the philosophy world.
I said, OK, well, I'm no longer just interested in how we discover economic knowledge.
How do we know any knowledge generally?
How do we make any claims about anything?
Is there any truth at all?
And if so, how could we arrive at it?
And so, that's how I got sucked into the philosophy domain, was actually through politics and economics.
It wasn't because I've been a lifelong philosopher.
Actually, I have a parallel story, which is I wasn't especially interested in philosophy.
In fact, I was frustrated by it, for the most part, until I became interested in evolutionary biology, which has two branches.
There's adaptive evolution, which is the part I'm interested in, but in order to do adaptive evolutionary thinking well, You have to have a proper phylogeny so you know which creatures are related to which other creatures and in what way and then you can describe the patterns of adaptations that have emerged on that tree.
But the problem is there are intense philosophical debates about what the right way to construct those trees might be and so I started to take it seriously and the more I did that The more I realized that actually it wasn't just phylogeny that depended on this.
It was your ability to think about anything clearly depended on your understanding of the philosophical dependencies that allow logic to work or cause it to fail.
Right?
You don't have to know them explicitly, but you do have to do it right or it doesn't work.
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Right, right.
I like to think of it as you have to be able to do a rigorous conceptual analysis for any discipline.
So it doesn't really matter what the discipline is.
You're going to find there are going to be ultimately philosophical questions about the core concepts of that discipline.
What exactly is a cell anyways?
What exactly is life?
And are we sure about what the definition is?
How did we arrive at that knowledge?
Could we be wrong?
It doesn't matter what the discipline is.
You're going to find those core concepts have to be examined, which I thought was Sort of obvious.
I sort of intuitively thought that was obvious.
But then, as I've researched different domains, I realized that not only does it seem to be not obvious, people are allergic to it.
I think it's shocking and preposterous to step back and try to do the deep conceptual analysis of things.
Actually, I worked in the nonprofit world briefly at a nonprofit that was focused on economics, teaching economic theory, let's say, to young people.
And in this job, I was talking to professors who I had assumed had already sorted out questions of economic methodology, where I was like, okay, these are already professionals, you know, they have the formal training, I was very naive.
And I thought like when I would talk to them, you know, bring up some of these interesting questions to hear what their resolutions were.
They didn't.
It's not even that they had bad ideas.
They didn't have any models at all.
They had no epistemology of their own domain.
And I thought, oh, my gosh, this is a scandal.
I can't believe this.
And then to my shock and horror, as I've researched other domains, I found the exact same pattern is nobody like people don't seem to be asking these types of questions.
Yeah, it's I don't want to say every domain because I think there might be one important Not a domain, but a temporal phenomenon that excludes a domain temporarily.
But I do think that in general, this is the truth of almost every domain, almost all of the time.
Okay, well, so I do want to ask you about that.
So, what is the exception here?
Because I'll tell you from my experience, prior to investigation, I would have intuitively thought there are a couple of areas which couldn't possibly be making the same oversights.
And that would be, number one would be mathematics.
And there was another one, less confidently, that I thought was physics.
That the mathematicians and the physicists are supposed to be the most rigorous of all.
Surely they are engaging seriously with their conceptual frameworks.
And then I found that's not the case.
That even in math, what seems to be the purest of all, pure logical deductions, they have not established a bunch of critical concepts.
Stretching back, it turns out, for at least a century.
There are, and I'd love to talk about this in more detail maybe later, but at least a century, you've got ongoing critical foundational crises that are not resolved even by the mathematicians.
So I thought, even if the mathematicians are polluted by this, there's no refuge.
But you think there is an exception?
Well, first of all, I do, I want to plead the case for the mathematicians.
I think you can find yourself much more forgiving of their foolishness if you realize that they are apes.
Right.
They may be mathematicians, but they are apes doing math.
Right.
And we'll see that conclusion.
Yeah, no, that's true.
When I say that though, people go, that is about the most offensive thing you could possibly say.
But when you say, because you're a biologist, you're making a technical claim.
I agree.
I agree.
Okay.
Yeah.
I mean, it's also a, a, a, a ruthless accusation about them, which I hope they will take personally, but yeah, no, it's also a technical, a technical claim about, about phylogeny again.
Yeah.
All right.
So my, my, my, my exception to the rule that everybody is really confused about the fundamentals of the, the work they think they're contributing to is um, a, A field in the process of enlightenment, I believe, may temporarily have insight.
I don't think it's global, but I think that fields, when they are actually in the process of, so my model for this involves You have some sort of an insight that kicks loose some, it opens a landscape, right?
There's some landscape of truths that nobody knows and then somebody comes up with an insight that opens the door to that landscape and there's a flurry of important work that follows.
That flurry of important work is a temporary state.
But it is a very different state than the hunting around for the next insight that opens the next landscape.
And so I guess what I would say is I find my colleagues in evolutionary biology much more confused than their immediate ancestors seemed to be.
Okay.
Well, this is going to get to some big questions.
Okay.
Do you say this based on your experience talking with their immediate ancestors, or based on reading the work of the immediate ancestors and finding it higher quality?
That is a great question, and it has a very, unfortunately, not simple answer.
Because evolutionary biology is basically a brand new field, right?
It starts in 1859, so very, very new stuff.
Uh, and because it had a heyday in the early to mid 20th century.
I knew some of the greats.
I didn't know them all, right?
Many were gone before I ever got there.
But I knew some of the greats.
And they did seem to me exquisitely clear-headed compared to the descendant generation.
Okay, this is fascinating.
This is a live, ongoing question I don't have an answer to, because I have heard people like yourself and a few others that talk about their education and maybe their interaction with the greats, and they They seem to think that there was a genuine intellectual rigor there, but I've never seen it because that worked.
I'm too many generations removed.
So I have had one hypothesis, which is what happened is with the invention of the Internet, it allowed information to flow such that It looks like orthodoxies right now are a lot more cacophonous.
But that's only because we have the technology that allows the dissenting voices to be heard.
Maybe it's the case that the reason there seem to be more Harmony a few generations ago.
It's because we didn't have the technology that allowed dissenters to speak.
So another way I would say this is, wouldn't you expect that with a technology like the internet, we would see the disassembly, eventually, of the great structures of knowledge that were put there by the previous generation?
Well, A, I think there may be something novel going on in the current moment, that we are actually looking at two problems.
One, you've got the influence that you've just described, where we can tune into the noise, and I do believe that Cultural evolution, cultural content is always very noisy at its inception and what makes culture useful is selection.
So basically what we, what persists, it tends to be much wiser than the back and forth by a lot.
So, there's also a Lindy effect here with respect to the ancestors, right?
The ancestors whose work stands the test of time, strike us as the greats of the past, whereas people we might have thought were the greats of the past that have been dispensed with because they turned out to be mostly wrong, they get forgotten.
So, there's a lot of different things that can cause this illusion.
But here's the really interesting data point that I have, and I only have one of them, but wow, is it interesting to me.
So I learned from three great mentors.
One of them was Bob Trivers, who's still alive.
I still know Bob.
I learned a ton.
I was an undergraduate.
He was my advisor of his.
And I learned from Dick Alexander, who was not as famous a person, but was as clear-headed a thinker as anybody in his generation of evolutionary biologists.
He was like a Dawkins-like figure, but his sentences were so complex that I think he just did not reach the audience that Dawkins did.
But anyways, brilliant guy.
And I learned from Dawkins, who I never met until 2018, but I learned because he wrote so much and I was able to read his books and they really resonated with me.
And so I learned that he was the mentor I'd never met until 2018.
Okay.
When I did meet him on stage and we had an extensive interaction, which was only partially captured on video, unfortunately.
Okay.
There's some of it is available, but some of it was lost apparently to everyone.
But what I found was that he had become confused about his own ideas.
And this is not, he is an older guy, but he's mentally very sharp.
This was not a question of him having, you know, lost his capacity to think.
This was a question of him having lost the courage of his convictions.
So what I said to him on stage actually was that, I found him in conflict with himself.
That his current ideas were defeated by his previous ideas.
And I wanted him to just look at what happens when you juxtapose them.
And this is, sorry, this is specifically about a biological concept?
Yes.
A biological concept of his own invention.
That's the thing.
So Richard Dawkins is the inventor of the concept of memes.
Right?
And memes, so cultural evolution was, it was understood to exist, but you really needed the concept of memes to turn it into a rigorous object to study.
And what I found when I talked to him about the meaning of cultural evolution, the meaning of mimetic adaptation, was that he viewed it as trivial And basically analogous to genetic evolution.
But he did not understand that it was actually the potent force that made our species capable of the unique evolutionary tricks that it can do, that no other creature can do.
Right?
He sees, you know, he sees Happy Birthday, the song, right, as a good example of how memes can evolve.
But it's an utterly trivial example.
He doesn't understand that Catholicism is a much better example, right?
That Catholicism and the way it evolves into Protestantism and that basically the story of human evolution is the story of how the genes offloaded the heavy lifting of adaptation to the software layer, and that that software layer and the genetic hardware layer have a direct relationship.
It's not that cultural evolution is like genetic evolution.
Cultural evolution is a means to an end employed by genes to solve problems the genes themselves cannot solve.
Dawkins, the inventor of the concept that allows you to see that, couldn't see it.
Which I'm stunned by.
Yeah, what is your explanation for that?
Well, I think there are a couple things that are true.
I think one thing is that nothing about evolutionary biology is remotely politically incorrect.
I mean, is politically correct.
It is a politically incorrect discipline that is, I mean, it's not that it's, it's not that what it says is bad.
It's that what it says about humans is arbitrary.
I see.
I see.
And so the problem is a, you know, in 1976 when Dawkins wrote The Selfish Gene, He was a young man.
He was a young gun, and he wasn't an established scientist.
He didn't have a long publication record.
He was a very gifted writer, and he was a very gifted thinker, and he had that sort of brash young man thing, and he wrote a brilliant book, and it caught on, and it made him who he is, right?
But the point is, as an established person with something to lose, As an older person who isn't, you know, brash and ready to go all in on these concepts, I think he has been some of the things he said to me on stage were thoughts that would be more characteristic of Stephen Jay Gould, who is like the antithesis of Richard Dawkins analytically, right?
They believed inverse things.
And yet, what I found Dawkins saying on stage were things that Stephen Jay Gould might have said and were shocking coming out of Dawkins' mouth.
And I believe that part of that is about having been right and losing the courage of those convictions because of the danger of where it might lead.
Okay.
Let me rip off this for a little bit.
This is fascinating.
Fascinating.
It might be that part of what's going on here is a high level of, let's say, conceptual ability in specific domains or even specific aspects of specific domains might not port onto thinking generally.
So let me, let me be a bit more specific.
It could be the case that when you read the work of Richard Dawkins, you are seeing an actually impressive idea structure.
And then we make this inference that the impressive idea structure comes from a mind that must be Generally competent in creating these idea structures.
This is not just a one-hit-wonder type thing.
There has to be a level of skill that we would expect would translate into especially different claims within that one domain.
Like you would say Richard Dawkins is a competent biologist.
You would like to say that because he wrote this incredible book.
When I look over history, I'm not sure that's true.
And I'm not sure it's the case that being really, really good on that one thing translates generally, which is shocking.
Okay.
This is, this is beautiful because I actually have in this, I mean, I hate to do Richard, if you're watching, I apologize for analyzing you this way, but here's the problem with what you've just said.
Okay.
The disagreement between Dawkins and me, Centered around the question of what to do with religion and things that behave like it.
And Dawkins' point, Dawkins is of course a famous atheist, and his point is this is a mind virus.
My point when, you know, we somehow, I've forgotten exactly how, but we asked each other on stage sort of, well, what do you think?
And he said, mind virus or the equivalent.
And I said, no, it's extended phenotype.
Now, extended phenotype is a Richard Dawkins concept, which he himself considers his most important contribution to biology.
That's his own assessment.
So, in addressing your hypothesis about what might be going on, my point is actually the zone in which Dawkins has to be hyper-competent in order for him to see what it is that I think should be right in front of him is his area of specialty more than anyone else's on earth.
I love that point.
I was not expecting that correction to go in that direction, but I love that point.
Okay, so let me throw out a new theory here.
Again, I don't have the answer to these questions.
I'm just trying to come up with some plausible theory for the information I'm taking in.
Okay, here would be a more controversial claim.
Is it the case, then, that there's a genuine possibility that Excellent writers are maybe synthesizing concepts that they don't themselves understand.
So could it be the case that like when you look at the history, for example, of the theory of relativity, did it originate with Einstein?
No.
Parts of it.
I mean, a synthesis of it was with Einstein, but there were little parts here and there beforehand.
Now, I'm not, I actually, I think Einstein is one of the few historical thinkers, a few recent historical thinkers who I'd say seem to have a lot of, uh, general purpose, conceptual skill.
He was, he was sort of aware of the process of theorizing, I think in a respectable way that a lot of his contemporaries weren't, but, but maybe it's the case that, sorry, I've never, I've never met Richard.
So it's, I guess it's okay if I, uh, you know, uh, speak off the cuff here, but maybe it's the case that that could be an example of somebody putting ideas together in a way that they genuinely themselves don't understand.
Maybe that's what's going on.
I don't think so.
And I, I think now I'm, I'm putting together all of the things that, that, um, happened surrounding this conversation and I'm realizing that I might have the answer as to what happened.
Um, And it was almost, the way it unfolded was very shocking.
Before I went on stage with Dawkins, I was in Chicago, and while I was in Chicago, I met with Jerry Coyne, who I had also never met, right?
He's another great from my field.
And I put a question to him.
So over breakfast, I asked Jerry Kine, I said, I don't understand why it is that there has been no major theoretical progress in our discipline since 1976, and this doesn't seem to bother anyone, right?
That suggests we're doing something wrong.
And he said something that astonished me.
I couldn't believe I was hearing one of the greats say this.
And what he said was, well, you know, I think my generation, that is, Coin's generation, got it all pretty well right, and there wasn't A lot left.
Okay.
So I'm sorry, continue.
Well, that's only half the story.
So first of all, I used to believe that myself.
When I started studying with Bob Trivers, I did feel like I'd been born too late because I thought I was good at evolutionary thinking, but all the big stuff had been done.
And it took me a while to realize how many big questions were completely unanswered And you just didn't hear them very often because the lack of progress had caused people to learn to stop talking about it, right?
And it was like question after question.
Big fundamental stuff was unanswered.
And as soon as I figured that out, I knew what I wanted to do with my life.
But I didn't see it immediately.
So, COIN was sort of revisiting this idea that they had gotten all the big stuff right and the only things left were cleanup.
Now, here's the part that blew my mind.
On stage with Dawkins, I asked him the question, why do you think we haven't made any major theoretical, I mean, you know, you can ask an evolutionary biologist, what are the great theoretical insights that we've had since 76?
And there's no good answer to that question, right?
They don't exist.
So I asked him that.
He said the same damn thing.
He said the same damn thing.
This is somebody who certainly has to understand that we do not yet have a robust explanation for, you know, we know why a peacock has a fancy tail, because the peahens don't mate with them if they don't.
We don't know why the peahens care, right?
We've got lots of ideas, and we can all name the ideas, but nothing totally works.
And I can tell you why they don't work, but never mind that.
The point is, here I am sitting with Richard Dawkins for the second time in one day, being told by one of the greats in my field that his generation answered all the big questions and the lack of progress was because we were done.
And it's just like, well, Even, you know, yeah, all right, go ahead.
So you take a young, independent mind like myself, who has not met the greats as you've described them.
I listen to that and I go, why would you call these people greats?
How could you arrive at the conclusion that somebody who believes we have arrived at the final truth on an extraordinarily complex topic is a great mind?
That seems like a very, very elementary error.
You know, well, here's the thing.
I mean, I know that there's... I'm going to get you in trouble, Brad.
I'm sorry.
You don't have to answer if you don't want to.
If there was more trouble I could get into, I might be worried, but I've already gotten in trouble with everybody.
Here's the thing.
Dick Alexander, my PhD advisor.
Would never in a million years have said that, right?
He wouldn't have formulated the thought and he would have mocked anybody who did, right?
So I do think there's at least two types of what I'm calling the greats and I guess the point is really they need two different categories, right?
There are people who have accomplished lasting things who may or may not be really good at it, right?
Darwin was a great, but apparently the idea was also ready to pop, right?
The fact that Wallace and Darwin both had the idea tells us that that one wasn't going to wait very long.
Right.
And it happens that Darwin was also great at what he did.
This also happens, I would love to talk about this in the history of mathematics, maybe later.
Same thing happens.
Cool.
Well, I'm very interested in this taxonomy because I think it has a lot to say.
But it is totally also possible for somebody to be at the right place at the right time and not really have extraordinary capacity.
I don't think that could possibly be true of Dawkins.
And really, Dawkins is so good at synthesis.
That which I think is something is a process we undervalue, right?
We don't even really talk about it as the counterpoint to reductionism, right?
And we should because the point is yes reductionism buys you something but you don't leverage that something until you synthesize it and figure out what the real picture is, right?
So anyway, maybe I'm making excuses for the man or maybe my My inkling is right that something changed about his level of intellectual courage.
Well, let me ask you one more question on this.
So you said you had an example of somebody who you considered a grade who would never make the claim that we solved biology.
Okay.
So do you think that, what was that gentleman's name?
Dick Alexander.
Dick Alexander.
Okay.
Do you think that Dick Alexander would consider Richard Dawkins a grade knowing the claim that That you just said, you know, if he were aware Dawkins claimed that biology is solved, what do you think he would say?
I think I know exactly what he would say because I think I had the conversation with him.
Okay.
So that's the thing is, you know, it's not a huge field and the fact that all of these greats of various kinds co-existed and we knew them meant that you sort of heard these conversations.
And the thing is, Dick respected Dawkins, and Dawkins respected Dick, but I don't think... Dick certainly did not see Dawkins as transcendent in some way.
Right.
He did see him as competent.
Very competent, let's say.
You know, and I think that's probably what Dawkins would say of Alexander also.
Um, but you know, the problem is, you know, again, back to the ape thing, you know, biologists are also largely apes and, um, largely.
Yeah.
I'd like to hear the accessibility.
There are some others, but all right.
All the ones I knew certainly, uh, show that, that evidence, but, um, the, there is resentment of a guy like Dawkins because of, you know, you've got all of these bright people.
In a brand new landscape of ideas, figuring out how a whole different type of biology works and making tons of progress.
And you have somebody like Dawkins who's very good at understanding it and very good at explaining it.
And so he disproportionately shows up on people's, on the public's radar because of his position, which I think did Dawkins a disservice because his real gift was synthesis, which I believe is actual science.
It's not popularization.
Synthesis is as important as reductionism, right?
And the fact that Dawkins was also good at popularizing got him dismissed too easily.
But anyway, Dick respected him, but I don't think he thought Dawkins was special except in his ability to communicate, which everybody agrees is extremely good.
So I think that is a consistent pattern that we would see across disciplines where the people that the general public and maybe undergrad students would consider as greats aren't.
I think generally when you look closely at different disciplines, it looks like there are a few brilliant original minds that are coming up with original concepts, doing interesting work, and And then there is another type of mind, which is the, uh,
The articulator, somebody that can skillfully talk about the concepts, do an interview for PBS that gets the cultural designation of this here as an intellectual, and then problems are caused from that moment.
Because what happens is there is a complex social phenomenon that happens where people will start to take sides.
And now they're going to be, it seems to be within academia as well, they're going to be defenders of the personality and critics of the personality.
And then very shortly, it is difficult to carefully reason through ideas because people start playing a social game.
And now, I mean, the COVID stuff was an incredible example of this, right?
How many people who took a very strong position on either the vaccine or ivermectin or whatever, or do you think we're genuinely sitting down on either side and thinking through the concepts carefully and how many were playing a social game?
I think that's the same type of phenomenon that happens in academia as well.
Well, it's interesting.
There's also another dimension to what you're calling the social game, right?
There's a social game, the trivial, destructive version of it, where you sort of jockey for recognition without contribution.
But the thing, you know, it's interesting to talk about Dick Alexander in this context, because the way you know who Alexander really was, was that he produced a huge number of students.
And to my knowledge, they all.
Revere might be slightly too strong a word, but the respect that that group of people holds for him is unparalleled.
Right.
And that's really about something.
He was very much.
uh He was very genuine.
He was very honest about what he didn't know.
He gave excellent feedback.
One of his rules was, you as student cannot work on what I'm working on.
And it's not because I don't want competition.
It's because I know that if we work on the same thing, it will be inevitable that there's ambiguity about what came from where, and I can't afford to have that.
Anyway, he was a brilliant mentor, and the number of people walking around who would tell you the same thing about him is, you know, it's dozens.
So anyway, he may be the unique, weird case, but I guess my point is, as much as his name is obscure, his influence isn't because it came through his students.
And very often the cases where you're talking about somebody who is the you know, the named great who might not be one very frequently, their students aren't so thrilled with them.
Okay.
Let me challenge you.
Yeah.
And we'll do a short one and then a long one.
Okay.
The short challenge is when you said that you're identifying the man's greats through the way that his students talk about him, that's different than saying, identifying the man's excellence by the quality of his, his students work.
So are you also making the claim that their work is very high, very high quality?
Well, the reason I didn't go that route is because not all of them stayed in.
The quality varies, but I would say nobody had anything like as high a hit rate.
The number of very high quality students that came out of that lab is very large.
Okay.
So that's, that is very interesting.
I'm going to talk for a minute.
If you'll give me a little room for a monologue here, this is going to, I guarantee this is going to be relevant.
Okay.
So we're gonna talk about the martial arts.
Okay.
So been very interested in martial arts for a while.
There's a lot of interesting parallels between the martial arts and the world of ideas.
History is very fascinating.
So I'm going to tell an abbreviated story.
Prior to, I think it was like the mid-20th century, you had the development of a thousand different schools of martial thought, technique, and skill.
You could broadly categorize them as striking arts, you could think of like boxing as being a striking art, kickboxing, and grappling arts, like wrestling, jiu-jitsu, that type of thing.
Okay?
What happened over in a martial arts has been practiced for thousands of years, but there was, there did not seem to be a platform up until fairly recently for excellent students of different disciplines to fight each other.
For whatever reason you had the jujitsu practitioners and the judo practitioners of a slightly different, different rules you have in the strikers, you have Western boxing, which is hands only versus kickboxing, which allows, you know, kicks versus Muay Thai, which allows kicks to the legs, different rule systems.
So what you had was absolute masters in their own disciplines who had a bunch of students that said, our Tai Chi guy, or maybe not Tai Chi.
That's not, that might be an exception, but our kickboxing guy is phenomenal.
He can knock anybody out and exceptional martial artists.
Everybody would rave about him.
You know, he's been, he's been a eighth degree black belt for 30 years.
Then what started to happen in the middle of the 20th century is there was a, there was a family called the Gracie's in Brazil that would, that would conduct Valley to the fights, which is no holds barred.
They thought they had developed the ultimate martial style.
And they said, listen, I don't care what you're, how big you are, how long you've been training, where are you on the world?
You come to Brazil and we'll fight you.
No holds barred.
And we'll see who wins.
It was both an excellent methodology for getting closer to the Marshall Truth and a great marketing tactic, because it's like, hey, what's happening here?
So, the abbreviated version is, this is called Gracie Jiu-Jitsu, an announcement of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.
Was totally revolutionary and dominated a bunch of traditional martial arts that had the super strong bodybuilders that could knock anybody out.
It turns out that grappling skill in a real Vale Tudo context is way more important than striking skill.
So even if you are exceptionally gifted within the rules and domains of kickboxing, it doesn't even translate almost at all sometimes to genuine martial skill.
Okay, so This is, by the way, this is the origins of the UFC.
I don't know if you're familiar, in MMA, there's this organization called the UFC.
This had their origins from the Gracie family, because they said, we want to have mixed martial arts competition to demonstrate the superiority of Gracie jiu-jitsu.
Interesting historical tidbit.
Okay.
One cool anecdote here, talking about kickboxing.
I highly recommend anybody watch this video if you're interested in psychology of when an expert discovers that he is not as skilled as he thought he was.
There was a guy called Rick Rufus, who was a kickboxer, I want to say in the 1980s.
Absolutely phenomenal kickboxing talent.
He was invited to participate in a striking match with a Muay Thai guy.
Which this wasn't, no, it was no grappling, but Muay Thai allows leg kicks and American kickboxing, which Rick Rufus came from, did not allow leg kicks.
So what happened?
Well, at the beginning of the fight, Rick looks impressive.
He's like doing all these, you know, fancy moves.
He rocks the guy.
Okay.
And then the Muay Thai practitioner discovers he has a technique that the other guy is totally unfamiliar with, which is the leg kick.
And so what does he do?
He keeps kicking the leg.
He keeps kicking the leg.
And then the guy can't walk.
And eventually Rick Rufus loses the fight because he was, despite being a master, you know, a international prize fighter, he had no experience with this technique.
And so interesting.
I bring this up to say, he's interviewed about this.
And what would you expect?
He says, he goes, well, you know, kicking the leg doesn't take any skill.
As you would expect, the person was like, OK, well, clearly I built my whole psychology around being a skilled martial artist.
Here's a guy who's smaller than me doing this fairly simple technique that I had no ability to counter, and he beat me.
That sort of invalidates me.
And that implies all of the social hierarchy around my dojo and all of the conferences that I give.
I thought I was an expert, but when the rubber meets the road, I guess I'm not as good as I thought.
Okay, that to me seems like exactly the circumstance of intellectuals and academics, especially over the course of the 20th century, as academia has grown.
You have these different disciplines that are hyper-specialized, and you have a bunch of prestige within the discipline and the great teacher that everybody reveres, but it turns out they're not actually conceptually, philosophically, generally skilled, and when they're met with interdisciplinary criticism, they just don't have the tools available to defend themselves, if you will.
Okay, now I think I know what happened.
Okay, and by the way, love the jujitsu analogy.
We'll come back to what that means in a minute here, but here's what I learned from Jerry Coyne and Richard Dawkins, which is the arbitrary reward structure that exists in academia Awarded them something which made them feeble in old age.
They weren't necessarily feeble.
I can't speak to Coyne as well, but I can say Dawkins of 1976 really had what it took to become a great.
I truly believe that.
When you become successful in this modality and that success brings you into a realm where you're now you're dealing with only the cream of the crop and everybody in the cream of the crop crowd has the same situation which is look if we start throwing punches That could be bad.
So if we agree to kind of pull our punches and be nice to each other, then, you know, we last.
And so the point is, I think what really happened to Richard Dawkins is that he escaped the zone of competition that would have kept him sharp.
Right.
And the thing that did not happen to Dick Alexander was that never happened to him because he collected around him the best students in the department who, you know, they were all young guns who would say whatever they thought needed to be said.
There was no, you know, etiquette about not, you know, attacking an idea that Dick had said.
Right.
So the point is, he stayed sharp because He surrounded himself with people who didn't believe in those games.
And I think what I really ran into with Dawkins was that he did not recognize... I mean, maybe because I'm not young anymore.
I was a young gun when I was young, and now I'm older.
But the point is, I still believe that my field is fucked up.
I still believe there are big discoveries that are staring us in the face that we are not seeking.
And he was not prepared because he was telling himself the story that there was no next generation of really good biologists because he didn't need one.
He didn't recognize somebody who knew some things he didn't know where he should have been.
He should have been fascinated by that.
And I was surprised to find that he wasn't.
Okay, this pattern is almost identical to martial arts stuff.
Just so people understand, like, when you see a pattern that is in wildly different areas and it's pretty much the same pattern, it's valuable to get a good model of what that pattern looks like.
Okay, so this is what happens in martial arts.
This is like a well-known thing in the world of martial arts.
People will get a some sort of, you know, they'll get a black belt in karate or something.
And then they're curious.
They've seen some of this jujitsu stuff.
So they go, you know, they might have, maybe they practice karate for eight years and they go into the jujitsu gym and they have, they get their butts handed to them by newbies, you know, kids that are smaller than them that have been training for a year and a half beat the sophisticated black belt that walks in the door. kids that are smaller than them that have been training
And then the, and then they are presented with the question, do I continue to get my butt handed to me by people that clearly know something I don't, or do I say, no, you know, it's not for me.
And I'm going to, I'm going to stick in my, uh, in the area in which I'm skilled.
That is a, that is a well-known phenomenon.
It happened to Chuck Norris.
That's an interesting story.
He's like a real martial artist in addition to being an actor.
And he was skilled in striking arts.
The same thing happened to him, got destroyed by jujitsu and said, oh, geez, you know, I'm going to stick around these people because they're, they're closer to truth than I was.
So I think in that, so you're sort of describing the same phenomenon that he had success and then he was presented with a choice.
Do I go back into the, do I go swim with the sharks again or do I continue the path without that sharp competition?
Yeah, I mean, in fact, you know, it's almost too good because the belt system is like a multi-tiered tenure system.
The point is, your black belt should be temporary as long as you Stay in, right?
As long as you demonstrate that your skill is a match for people at this level, you keep your black belt, but it should degrade.
You should go back down.
That's actually a thing.
There are some schools where if you tap out, somebody of a higher belt, you swap belts.
Oh, that is a good sense to me.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, um, actually this is kind of crazy how, how well this analogy works, but I'm sure you, you will not be surprised to hear what happened to Gracie Jiu Jitsu.
Well, it exploded in the 1980s with MMA.
It was like, everybody's like, Oh my gosh, this is obviously closer to truth.
We got it.
Everybody's got to figure out how to use these techniques.
So it was a massive vindication for the Gracie family and the Gracie school.
But then what happened?
Well, they became the experts.
They became the guys that had solved.
There was no more knowledge to learn in the domain of grappling, even, which is their domain.
It's not just martial arts and grappling in particular.
They're like, ah, You know, those leg locks that some of those, uh, those people were using and catch, catch wrestlers over there, that's cheap stuff.
So like there would be techniques that they weren't as good at, like, like leg locks, they would be caught by the other grapplers and they would then poo-poo those techniques.
It's the same story.
So they became, there's, I still have an enormous amount of respect for them and everything that they've developed, but some of them have become the experts whose skill level has not improved since the 1980s.
They're still doing the same techniques while others have continued to evolve and iterate.
Yeah, well... Have you heard that story before?
Nah, I don't know that story, but it does not surprise me.
I mean, I... No, no, I mean in the abstract.
Like, is that not exactly what happens in academia?
It happens in everything, and it's terrifying, right?
Like, I fear... How do I... I will invest anything in making sure that doesn't happen to me.
I think I may know now that the solution actually is the equivalent of students, young guns, whatever, right?
You can stave this problem off by making sure that you are in the arms race, that you are not resting on your laurels.
But anyway, that is fascinating.
I did want to say, I hear in the way you think an awful lot of analogy to the way I think.
Where you're borrowing, you know, you're a philosopher, right?
So of course you're interested in MMA, right?
You know, naturally.
Well, naturally.
But I do find it very natural.
So the way, you probably know nothing about my biology, but my specialty is trade-offs.
And my claim is that although biological trade-offs have been long recognized, that we are missing the fact that there is actually a set of rules that govern them.
They are not haphazard things that emerge here or there that we can actually specify.
We can talk about the rules that govern trade-offs and that I think essentially every big unanswered question in biology that I'm aware of can be readily answered if you approach it through an understanding of how trade-offs have to work, the fact that there's a taxonomy of trade-offs, And, you know, so you may be looking at different trade-offs, but in any case, the point is, how did I get there?
Well, I did what you just did with MMA.
I used some disciplines that I knew well that were complex, but simpler than biology, right?
So photography was a very useful one for me.
Aviation was a very useful one.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Bicycles.
These were places where there was enough complexity for there to be trade-offs, but there wasn't so much complexity that it just got lost in the noise.
And so if you can extrapolate from those areas and then say, well, all right, here's how it works in a bicycle.
Yes.
How would that look in the world of birds?
You know, it was very clarifying.
Yes.
So, definitely.
I definitely have a similar story there where a lot of my interest, not just in academic stuff, is in, let's say, extracurricular learning.
So, I've been fascinated by chess and the jiu-jitsu stuff and musical stuff, and I've got a ton of hobbies.
And what I found fairly early on is a lot of the patterns that you discover in chess are directly applicable to jiu-jitsu.
I mean, they're practically the same thing if you just Orient them a little bit differently.
Instead of chess pieces, you're dealing with limbs.
And this is true of music.
If you develop some musical skill, you're going to discover patterns that are generally applicable.
Sorry, just needed a notepad here.
Yeah, it's an issue of variations on a theme.
And the way I, you know, my note card in my mind for, you know, the thing I say to students to get them to sort of start developing that understanding is, That the universe is composed of a very tiny number of types of objects, right?
Just even the fundamental physics.
It's not made of very many things, right?
But it's obviously hugely variable.
So if you're going to build a universe as complex as this one out of a tiny number of Legos, You're going to get some themes that repeat, right?
And so being able to spot them between domains is effectively, it's like a cheat code.
It is.
Absolutely.
And they build.
They build on each other.
So you can learn skills way faster Just by having high skill in a totally unrelated domain, which is also one of the reasons why I bulk so hard when people are skeptical of interdisciplinary knowledge and claims.
Like, oh no, you've got to stay in your lane.
I'm thinking, you've got to do the opposite.
You've got to swerve everywhere you can.
Like, get the biggest truck that's taking up as many lanes as you possibly can.
That's a better way of learning.
So here's the reason that they're skeptical of interdisciplinary studies, is because interdisciplinary studies is a euphemism for lack of disciplinary studies.
They've got the wrong impression, but I agree with you.
In fact, this is part of why I love evolutionary biology.
Since all of biology is evolutionary, this is a license to transgress every disciplinary boundary until you get to inanimate objects.
Yes, I agree.
What, what fucking lane, you know?
Show me the lane marker and I'm going to cross it.
It sounds a whole lot like Rick Rufus saying, Oh, leg kicks.
No, no, no.
That doesn't take any skill.
I don't want to deal with any of that.
Keep that, you keep the leg kickers in your own game.
Right.
Well, and we saw this in COVID and it was mind blowing, right?
Because it was like, you know, you know, these vaccines couldn't possibly be safe.
Okay.
Well, but you're not a vaccinologist.
Okay, but I'm an evolutionary biologist and the vaccinologists aren't epidemiologists and the epidemiologists aren't virologists and none of them are evolutionary biologists, right?
And none of them are physiologists and they aren't doctors.
So the point is everybody is out of whatever discipline they trained in most of the time in order to deal with something that has as many facets as COVID did.
The only people who had a prayer of doing it well were either Generalists who were capable of learning what they needed to know to understand the other disciplines, or clinicians who were in a position to see what actually took place with people, right?
So you had some doctors who didn't have these other areas of specialty, but they could see the damn pattern, right?
That worked.
Or being a generalist who was capable of saying, well, all right, let me, you know, here's a new family of viruses.
I know nothing about how they work, but I can learn it.
Okay, so I don't know if we're ever going to talk about Dark Age stuff, but I gotta go on this line because it's so interesting.
I was just having a conversation about this the other day.
So, you said the people that are likely to have the tools to gain high-quality models on COVID are going to be people who are on the ground, the practitioners, and what was the other one?
Generalists.
Generalists, right, who can learn on the fly.
Okay.
I generally agree with you, but that leads to some, I think, odd, unorthodox conclusions.
So here's a question.
No, sorry.
Sorry, on the Dark Horse podcast, unorthodox conclusions are not acceptable.
So, okay.
But is it...
So here's a question.
Who has the final say on the efficacy of drugs?
Oh, I got this one.
Do the academic researchers or do the practitioners?
Nature and physiology.
Okay.
Right.
That's it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
True.
Okay.
Well, look, I mean, but in terms of who has more reliable knowledge.
So if we have a disagreement, as we did have a disagreement between academic researchers doing research and meta research and practitioners on the ground saying, listen, I'm doing this and here's the results.
How do you weigh these?
Practitioners.
A hundred percent.
That's the same answer I just gave you, incidentally.
Right?
I don't care what you think is true.
There's a question about what is actually true.
Right?
And so the point is the clinician, and this is why I never understood what argument was being made with respect to, you know, RCTs, randomized controlled trials and the efficacy or not of something like ivermectin.
It's like, look, you have a large number of clinicians who have been treating with this drug.
Now, it's possible that somebody is no good at all at what they do and that they're lying to themselves.
But you've got a large number of people who are seeing this pattern in many different places, right?
People who have long track records of not losing a patient since they started with this protocol, right?
You can't ignore that.
If your RCT says this thing doesn't work and your clinicians are telling you yes but I'm not losing any patients when I put them on it, now at least you've got a question.
How could those two things be simultaneously true?
What don't I know?
Yeah, what's testing what?
Is it the case that that means everybody is fooling themselves in the field or is it the case that maybe that's evidence that's Something's wrong with the RCT.
I mean, look, I'll even take it one step further.
I know it doesn't go this way because we now know enough about ivermectin and how it does work and how to apply it, but suppose you just didn't know anything.
And suppose what you had was doctors who used the damn stuff, not losing patients.
And then you say, well, you know, that could be a confound.
Cool.
Maybe that confound is in their protocol.
Maybe it's not ivermectin.
Let's use their protocol and let's save some lives.
Right?
And the point is you're still prioritizing an RCT that doesn't tell you what to do over people who apparently do know what to do.
And actually, yes, I have an example of this.
It's weird.
If you'll permit it.
Of course.
Uh, my first research gig, I went with Bob Trivers to Jamaica.
Okay?
I was studying lizards in Jamaica, but it doesn't matter.
The local, I was way off in the country, right?
Not in Kingston.
I was way off in the country and there was a bunch of kids in the neighborhood, you know, who, you know, a bunch of different ages and they just ran around as a little group doing stuff all day the way kids might off in the country.
And they found me interesting because I came from somewhere else and I took them seriously and I talked to them.
Anyway, that's all unnecessary.
They did, at some point, I had the hiccups, and one of them said that he had a cure for hiccups, and I said, oh.
And he said, yeah, do this.
He said, I want you to spit a big loogie into your hand, and then I want you to take your finger and put it in there, and I want you to get it on your finger and paint an X on your forehead.
I did it.
Hiccups gone.
Okay?
Pretty good.
Next time I had hiccups, try it again.
Works every time.
Now, it's not as crazy as it sounds, right?
It turns out that the key to it is getting the loogie in your hand.
The productivity, getting that thing to surface is what does it.
Painting the X on your forehead is completely pointless.
And how would they know, right?
Well, I think they did.
I don't know if they knew, actually.
That's an interesting question.
Yeah, it's an interesting question.
Probably some of them knew.
You know, probably the joke is that they can get you to put your own spit on your forehead.
But anyway, the point is, okay, it's a protocol, and some of it actually is useless, and some of it is the thing that works, but in a world where you would throw out a protocol that worked because your RCT said the drug wasn't effective, like, what kind of fool are you?
Okay, there's so much to say there.
Okay, I do want to give another interesting example of this.
So, there are a lot of superstitious beliefs that got a bad rap from the scientists of the last couple of centuries.
Because it turns out that practices might work for reasons we don't understand.
Yeah, right?
Shocker!
So, one of them I came across the other day that I thought was interesting was the burning of sage in a graveyard.
So, if you're trying to approach this in a non-empirical fashion, an academic fashion, you'd say, what a ridiculous, superstitious practice that somebody would walk around and burn sage as a funeral rite.
It's a non-sequitur.
You're burning an herb.
There's no connection.
Well, it turns out that I guess sage smoke is some anti-microbial.
So if you're around corpses, it would actually make sense that that would be a practice that is going to be a good thing to do, even if the story that is told is that it's to ward off the spirits.
They have people who they might not know, but it still works.
So one of the things that Dawkins and I tangled over is my argument for religion is that it is literally false but metaphorically true.
That's my category.
Literally false but metaphorically true.
And what it means for something to be metaphorically true is that If you act as if it is true, you out-compete someone who acts according to the fact that it is false.
That's a good way of putting it, yeah.
In other words, if you act so as to go to heaven, you will not find yourself in heaven, but the advantage to your Genes of your having behaved that way may be so great that it is worth all of the costs that come along with behaving that way, right?
So anyway, this is this is exactly and it's like this.
Let's take take this example.
The Bible The Old Testament describes Yahweh as being incensed by filth, that is shit, in camp.
Right?
Yahweh is not cool with people shitting in camp.
Right.
Well, here's the problem.
Yahweh doesn't actually exist, right?
So he can't really be incensed.
But, if you behave as if there's a dude in the sky who knows everything you do, and he really doesn't like that behavior, it just so happens that you do the same thing that the germ theory of disease would lead you to do, which is keep feces away from where people are going to step into.
Okay, let me add a little bit here.
So, you've just given an example.
I think that is what it should sound like when coming from an evolutionary biologist.
That might not be the right way to frame things though.
So when you say that, uh, you know, Yahweh doesn't exist, that implies maybe what Richard Dawkins conception of Yahweh Yahweh is.
So, so what if it's the case, just for example, what if it's the case that when religious people are talking about God, some of the time, not, not all denominations, but some of the time they're actually just talking about reality or like the structure, the inherent structure of reality.
Now if I start saying, well, you're a human and what is Yahweh's relation to humans?
Well, it turns out Yahweh really doesn't like nature, reality, the structure outside of us doesn't like and will punish you for having shit in the camp.
Now suddenly that starts to make a lot of sense.
I totally, I totally believe this, right?
In fact, I talk this way.
I deliberately talk this way, right?
Because it is important, right?
So my conception is religion has various components.
They do different jobs, okay?
The key thing that religion does is guides you in ways that affect your behavior, so that your behavior is modified in a way that enhances your fitness, right?
There's a lot of story that goes along with that to make it work, to make it memorable, you know, to get you to prioritize things well.
The story doesn't have to be true at all.
In other words, atheists focus a lot on the fact that the creation myths can't possibly be right.
Right, they're transparently false.
But the point is that their purpose is not to be true, right?
Their purpose is to begin the story, to get you in the right mind frame, so that you can get the advice.
The advice, the directives, the prescriptions are the things that are where it is capable of affecting your fitness, right?
So it's like, I think of it as, you know, the trunk of a tree.
The trunk of a tree is not productive.
But the trunk of a tree gets the leaves up to where they can be productive, right?
You can't eliminate the trunk because it's not productive, it's a necessary cost.
And so, anyway, I do agree.
Religious people, and I know lots of them and I talk to them and I have good relationships with most, they are not... you can't... to synonymize them with their creation myths is absurd.
Yeah, it's preposterous.
It's preposterous.
And that...
You know, and the other thing, well boy, does this one drive people like Dawkins nuts, is to point out that the very thing that religious people do when they use vague references to God to sort of fill in for the part of the story we can't quite explain in deep terms, It's exactly what we do in science, and have to, right?
Good science depends on the ability, like, you know, okay, whatever your discipline is, you're walking into a structure in which here are some things that we do understand, and then here are some other things that we do understand, and the things that are between them we don't yet understand.
And we have to put something in that space that doesn't destroy our ability to think in the two places that we understand, and it's probably not going to fit exactly what goes in that space when we ultimately understand it.
So the point is, giving yourself leeway to say something, a vague model that is approximately right, that fits in a spot temporarily, is absolutely necessary.
Yes.
That goes very, very, very deep.
So, in the story that you have been telling about what nature and reality is, I think you said something like, you know, it's all reducible to fundamental bits, little Lego pieces.
Is that true?
The characters in the novel you're telling are the fundamental bits.
In the story that I would tell, I think one aspect of reality is the fundamental bits.
And very, very fundamental.
I'm a, I'm a finite test.
So I think there's like actually like Lego blocks of space.
I think that's a good way of thinking about space.
But I also think there is a consciousness that I cannot find a way to reduce the texture of my conscious experience to three dimensional spatially extended Lego blocks.
So I have, you're a pan psychist.
Not quite.
I'm actually a pluralist.
So, I think that there are different categories of existence.
My guess is there are at least three.
I think you have spatially extended blocks, the physical world.
I think you have the contents of consciousness, which is something that is not reducible to three-dimensional blocks.
And then I think you have an abstract category, which is something like the relation between the conscious states and the physical states or even the relations between the physical states and themselves.
So if you think about like the laws of physics, for example, are the laws of physics composed of physical building blocks?
No.
Are the laws of physics conscious?
Does consciousness have something to do with the laws of physics?
I don't think so.
I think, I think they exist.
I think the laws of physics exist.
I think they do have, there's some force that's gluing states of the universe together, but I would put it in its own ontological category.
So that's, that wouldn't be pantheism.
So I'm a, I'm a, I'm a pluralist.
I'm sorry.
What did, what did you say?
You said panpsychist.
Panpsychist.
Yeah.
I might be a pantheist.
I'm not a panpsychist.
Sorry.
I bring that up to say, to, to, to push you into a corner and say, ah, but you're, you're telling a story here that, uh, or your fundamental concepts might be incorrect because, Is it possible, let's say that we're entertaining a theory in which there's physical stuff, maybe conscious states are in a separate, some kind of a separate system, obviously they're related, and then there's an abstract system, maybe that's where the laws of physics resides or something.
Can, is there, are each of these equally fundamental?
So is it possible that we could dispense with the abstract stuff?
It might be, it might be like, there's a theory here.
I think it's called, what is it called?
I forget what it's called, but it's something like, you know, the laws of physics are ideas So maybe all we have is, you know, physical stuff and mental stuff.
And, you know, the mental is more fundamental and you don't need the abstract stuff.
Can you dispose with the physical stuff?
Well, I actually think you can.
I think it's conceivably possible to tell the idealist story, which says that everything is mental.
Everything is an experience.
Everything is an idea.
I don't take that position, but it's at least conceivably possible that the most basic story we tell about the physical world is wrong.
Is it possible to dispense with the existence of consciousness and conscious mental states?
I would say no.
There's no story that we could tell that is possibly true in which our conclusion is consciousness doesn't exist.
So I would actually put the conscious and the mental, at least in terms of our levels of certainty, I would say it is the existence of mind that underlies our belief about the mere existence of the physical world, though I do think there is a physical world.
All right.
Sorry about the monologue.
No, not at all.
I appreciate it more than you know.
So, let me just say a few things and we will sort them into meaning in the aftermath.
One, many of my favorite thinkers are panpsychists.
And I think they are dead wrong about this, and it doesn't matter to me.
There's a principle that a contractor I was working with once said, that there was often one room in the house Where all of the various errors from other parts of the house had been shunted.
So there's one room that just makes no freaking sense.
All the angles are wrong.
Yeah, you've pushed every defect.
You can push it out of the rooms, but they got to go somewhere.
So kind of better to concentrate it in that one closet or whatever.
And panpsychism strikes me as Where all of the error terms push you and it causes you to say something, and I'm not saying you're a panpsychist, I heard the distinction that you're drawing, but nonetheless, it strikes me that people who are very clear-headed in realms that I often care about
End up panpsychist because all of the error terms get pushed there and it's like, well, if we just make consciousness into a fundamental, then problem solved.
And it's like, no, problem deferred, not solved.
So here's the other thing.
I cannot for the life of me figure out why people see consciousness as especially difficult.
Okay.
Now, I'm an evolutionary biologist, and my feeling is, yeah, consciousness is difficult in the same way that an appendix is difficult and color receptors are, but it's not... Well, I'll take a stab at it.
Let me take a stab at why I think there's a unique problem here.
Good.
We can imagine the behavior of a brain being correlated with conscious experience.
So we say, okay, what is consciousness where it's something like a brain state?
Is that what you would say is like a processing, information processing in the brain?
The definition that Heather and I use in our book, Consciousness is that fraction of cognition that is packaged for exchange.
Okay, well let's strongly overlap things that are linguistic.
So a conscious thought is one that if somebody said penny for your thoughts you could convey.
Okay, I think that's missing something.
I'll try to get at the concept of pure experience, or the texture of experience.
You can imagine an ape being exposed to music.
There's sound waves in the air, and it vibrates something in the ear, which then causes some complex electrical phenomenon up here.
You can imagine that happening without any internal experience.
Without any subjective experience.
Yeah, right.
Right.
So the nature of the subjective experience, I think, is in a different ontological category than the nature of the physical phenomena.
I agree with this.
this.
And one of the things that is very, if you look at a spider that is in the process of being attacked by, I don't know, a bird or something.
It behaves in a way that suggests panic.
Yeah.
I do not believe there is any reason for us to imagine that there is something in front of us having the experience of panic.
Panic is a means to an end.
And the end is the same one.
The spider is engaged in evasive behavior.
But I believe, and it is possible to be wrong about this, I'm well aware that it could be wrong, but I don't think Occam's Razor being what it is, and we can talk about what is and is not right about Occam's Razor, but Occam's razor being what it is, I don't think it gives us any extra explanatory power to imagine that the spider has a subjective experience.
Would you say the same about humans?
No.
It clearly does give us an advantage in the case of humans.
I would argue it gives a subjective experience is Strangely distributed across creatures.
You will find substantial subjective experience in all mammals, probably all birds.
Seems to be in things like cephalopods, octopi, for example.
So what is it then that... So we have two theories.
One is which nobody other than Brad is conscious.
Uh, and the other is that the other things that look like humans are having a conscious experience.
Yep.
Um, what does the theory add to say the other creatures are having a conscious experience, but we could, we could explain their behavior just like we would explain the behavior of the spider.
Yeah, no, no.
Uh, you as a philosopher will have to help me put this into the proper form, but The universe in which I have consciousness and the other things that are like me in every regard and phylogenetically closest to me do not have it, though they behave as if they do have it, is a very strange universe.
Yes, it's strange, but it's conceivable, right?
We can imagine that that's... I would not say it's conceivable.
I would say it is possible.
Somebody could have constructed a universe in which I was the only conscious creature, and it could look like this one, so that universe is possible.
But what would have to be true for somebody to have constructed a universe in which I am a constructed entity with a subjective experience?
That's nuts.
So, so it has to be conceivable in the sense that that's what we're talking about that picture.
So we have a, we have a, we're both entertaining the, a different universe in which there was only one conscious creature.
Yup.
And, and a lot of other things look very similar.
Yup.
The physical structure.
I agree.
I cannot form, I mean, look, it, it's a, it's Bertrand Russell's teapot orbiting the sun.
Okay.
I cannot rule out the possibility that there is a teapot on the opposite side of the sun from the earth.
Right.
I have zero reason to believe that.
Right.
So, so, but the point is not to make an existence claim to say things are or not this way.
The point is to illustrate, to, to sharpen the concept of subjective experience and what it's actually doing.
Yep.
So, so we have three universes.
We have this one and we're not going to make any claims about what's going on in this universe, but then we have two other universes.
One is which there's only one conscious entity.
Yep.
There's only one subjective string of experiences going on.
And it has to be me and everybody watching this conversation can say the same thing.
Right.
So sure.
Sure.
Something like that.
Um, and then the other is where it's, uh, it's effectively a, um, looks like a duplicate copy of, uh, this universe, or maybe we could actually, since it's not this universe, let's say there's no consciousness at all.
There's just the behavior.
There's just ape-like things.
All the appearances look the same, but there is no consciousness.
So I'm saying, if we're evaluating Universe 1 and Universe 2, what explanatory power does it add Yes, language is going to make it difficult to explain why that's a simple problem.
experience taking place in universe one, when the behavior will be the same in universe two, the peer there's just not conscious, the internal experience there.
Yes.
Language is going to make it difficult to explain why that's a simple problem.
Um, the, the confines of language, but the base, we can table this by the way, if you want to This is definitely getting in the woods.
No, no.
I'm gonna reducto ad absurdum to show why this doesn't work.
Okay.
Let us agree that while a whirlwind going through a junkyard will never assemble anything like an airplane, That physically speaking, there is nothing involved in the construction of an airplane that could not be accounted for by a randomizing force action on physical things.
Sure.
The question is, if I now go out and look at airplanes.
And I say any airplane that I did not watch the construction of could be the result of a random process acting on parts.
And the answer is, for some reason, I don't have to, that is not in the realm of the possible, though it's obviously in the realm of the physically possible.
So, but, but in the, in the case of the consciousness claim, I'm not saying, I'm not making an existence claim.
So, so from my understanding, you're saying that the concept of subjective experience adds to our explanatory power and maybe our predictive power.
And so I'm trying to make a thought experiment in which you have the same external phenomenon, the same measurable phenomenon in some universe, It just doesn't come with the conscious experience.
This is sometimes called the hard problem of consciousness.
I don't think it's a hard problem.
I think it is.
I think it is.
I really don't think it is.
And I really don't think it is probably because from where I sit as an evolutionary biologist, there ain't nothing hard about this.
Okay.
The fact when we have two creatures, that share a trait.
There are two possibilities about why they might share that trait.
They either inherited it from some ancestor, right, so it is identical by descent or the equivalent, Or, it is convergence, where they did not get it from a shared source, but the universe has created it more than once.
Okay?
So, birds and bats share wings because of convergence.
Birds and birds share wings because of descent.
So the point is, you are describing a universe of creatures that behave as if they are conscious, the way I know myself to be.
And the question is, what is the most likely explanation that something as complex as subject experience evolved uniquely in me without providing an apparent benefit because everybody else behaves as if they're conscious, right?
That's a story I can't make any sense of.
Chances against it are as great as the chances against random forces making an aircraft.
Okay.
Yeah.
I think we might agree with that part.
Probably not where that goes, but with that part, well, I think you're making the case here for free will is what you're saying.
That's how, that's where I would want to take it to say that the conscious subjective experience has a causal role.
Yes, it has to, it has to.
And believe me, the argument that I would... First of all, I don't want myself straw-manned on free will.
Do I believe that man has free will?
Very, very little of it.
Much less than we think.
But you're saying, but it's got to be some of it, otherwise it wouldn't be here.
Right.
We can't, there's nothing you can do to, I mean, first of all, if you, if there is no room for free will in this universe, if the universe is, for example, fully deterministic, then evolution doesn't mean what we think it does.
There's no such thing as competition.
Competition is as if competition, right?
I just love that this has taken a totally unexpected turn.
So the disagreement stems maybe from differences and perspectives of free will.
So you're a free will guy.
It's so interesting.
I'm not a free will guy.
No, it sounds like you're a free will guy.
You're a little free will guy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
When it comes to free will, my answer is not zero.
You're not going to believe this, so I disagree with your ontology here.
I think there is a hard problem of consciousness.
I'm a substance pluralist where I think you have two-way interaction between mind and body and body and mind, but they are uniquely different and there's a shocking There's a shocking fact that there should be consciousness when contrasted with the rest of the physical universe.
Like the difference between a unit of three-dimensional space and the feeling of hearing music is just staggering to me.
But I also agree with you.
I think we do have, there's a room for a little bit of free will.
You do?
It's sort of, I do.
It's not a lot.
It's something like this, you have free will to the extent that the universe has put you in an environment such that you can exercise it, which may only happen farther down the evolutionary process.
Right, and then I will go one step further and I will say that there is, and this is This is a value judgment.
This is normative.
But given that there is not zero free will, that there is actually certainly value.
It's possible.
Based on everything else that you have said, I'm going to plant my flag.
the amount of free will available, not just to you, but to your descendants and to your fellow humans.
It's possible.
I, based on everything else that you have said, I'm going to, I'm going to plant my flag and I'm going to say, if you walk down that road, you're going to end up in a place that does not look like, uh, an atheist, uh, evolutionary you're going to end up in a place that does not look Evolutionary biologist perspective.
Well, I'm not an atheist.
Oh, I assumed that you were.
I thought I heard that somewhere.
Well, people say it of me, and my feeling is that any religious person who hears me describe what I believe will call me an atheist, but I can't really be one, because if I believe
That belief, A, if I believe that scientists, in order to do their work properly, have to have beliefs that are de facto faith-based just to even get the work done, and I believe that people whose orientation is religious are engaged in utilizing the exact same structure in order to navigate life, then the distinction is quite artificial.
And I think, frankly, it's classist at some level.
I feel like this is just going to open up this infinite can of worms here, because I appreciate that perspective, but I have not encountered the argument that says we have to have the faith.
Oh, come on.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We'll talk about it.
There's something else I really want to talk about, but let's have that conversation because you seem shocked by it.
So that's gotta be, it seems to me we can dispense with this one really easily.
Okay.
Okay, good.
So first of all, Descartes cheated, right?
I think therefore I am is a cruddy proof that doesn't prove anything.
Okay.
But it is a necessary proof.
And the reason it is a necessary proof is because if you cannot establish that you exist, right?
Then anything that you wish to do, if you believe that you need to start with the basics and work your way up, there's no way to prove that you do exist.
If Descartes' proof, which sucks.
I disagree.
Well, it depends on the formulation of Descartes' proof.
So how about this one?
Let me throw it out there and see if this is falsifiable.
It is the case that there is at least one conscious state taking place in the universe at this moment.
Um, I mean, it strikes me.
Yeah.
I mean, it is, it's Descartes in a... Without the person aspect, because sometimes people object to Descartes and they say, well, what is a person?
And I'm just saying, no, no, I like it.
It's like the, I'm trying to remember whether the, uh, I guess the Mott is the more robust version.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We're just, persons aside, consciousness is happening.
Yeah.
Consciousness something.
Yeah.
That's a proof I would almost accept.
There are mental states.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That seems like a solid foundation, though.
I have a hard time thinking that way.
No, but here's the reason that you need Descartes' version and that that more robust version doesn't get you where you need to go.
Okay.
Because if I'm to do science, I need to exist.
But you don't need a proof that you exist.
This is the point.
I absolutely do not need a proof that I exist.
Right?
What we can do is we can say, let's just cheat.
Assuming I exist, everything I'm going to conclude for the rest of my life.
If I don't turn out to exist, then all that stuff is garbage.
I see.
I see.
Okay.
So let me, let me try to articulate this principle and see if you agree with it or not.
Okay.
There are some, Objective, discoverable, even certain truths.
But they don't get you very far.
Truths like consciousness is taking place.
Truths like, I think there are other logical truths.
If there are objects in the world, then they are however they are, and they aren't however they aren't.
Doesn't tell you much about the world, but I think there's an aspect of logical necessity.
And if you want to do science, there are all kinds of Reasonable assumptions that you have to make that you might be wrong, but you have no reason to believe that you're incorrect.
All right.
Okay.
I think what we're looking for here, and I think we're circling around the same concept and we're, because we don't share a language yet, it's a little hard to wrestle it into a statement.
My feeling is that let's take the Big Bang.
Yeah.
And I'm going to make a confession.
I am a believer in the Big Bang, though I can't even imagine What I could possibly take to be useful evidence that such a thing existed.
I know it's a story that people like.
I know that its effect on my work is zero.
I don't need the universe to have started with the Big Bang for there to be an Earth with living creatures on it for me to understand how they work.
So it's not really important whether I've got it right or not.
And if I found out tomorrow that the Big Bang was the wrong story and it was some other story, that'd be fine.
Right?
But the basic point is, look, the story of science Starts with the big bang.
Okay.
It starts with the big bang.
And from there, you know, you get the plasma and it cools and you get the creation of, you know, hydrogen and then you get some supernovas and they create heavier elements and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
We can do that thing.
But the basic point is, look, I need something at the beginning of the story so I can get to the part I give a shit about.
Right.
Yeah.
Okay.
Now my point is my own.
You know, Descartes and his establishing that he must exist or he couldn't be thinking, right?
That's good enough to get you to, I am capable of observing the universe and therefore conducting science within it.
And if it turns out that I don't exist, then, or it turns out the universe doesn't exist and it's an illusion, then the science I do in it won't be right, but it's not going to hurt anybody.
You know?
And so the basic point is, look, hey, that's good enough.
I need a cheat proof at the beginning.
I need the universe to exist.
Big bang.
I need myself to exist.
Descartes.
And now I'm going to go do some work.
And if it turns out that those things are really way off, what have I lost?
Okay, so our disagreement then might be around this idea of faith because I think you can build up a reasonable story about what you are, about the Big Bang, about you as a scientist.
I don't, I wouldn't consider those are aspects of faith.
I mean, unless you mean I don't have a, like a logical proof, because I grew up around a lot of faith and that my, I grew up at evangelical Christian community.
There was a lot of faith, which was not, Synonymous with a lack of proof.
Okay.
Now I think I got you right where I want you.
Okay.
Because what you said earlier in the conversation was that you thought that religious people, when they were speaking about, you know, God, Yahweh and his feelings about filth, really weren't speaking about like a guy and feelings that was sort of a placeholder really weren't speaking about like a guy and feelings that was sort of a placeholder for, you know, no filth in camp, The universe doesn't like that shit.
Right.
Yeah.
So I agree with that.
And my point is, look, if that's faith, if faith is, okay, we're going to talk about Yahweh and he's like a guy and he has feelings about the universe and we should take them seriously, even though he's not really a guy and he doesn't have feelings.
If that's what the faith really is, okay, then the point is that's the faith I have to go do my science.
I have faith that the universe exists, that it probably came from something Big Bang-ish, and that I exist enough that I can perceive the universe and make useful conclusions about it.
That's my faith, but the point is, it is It is hypocritical of me to avail myself of that tool to do my work and then be critical of people who believe it about Yahweh.
My feeling is one and the same.
I think we have to sharpen the distinction of religious people here.
So when I say maybe this is what religious people are saying as they're using different language to talk about the universe, that is not Correct, because if you talk to religious people, they will absolutely insist, some of them, some percentage of them, will say, I am not speaking metaphorically, I am speaking literally.
So I think actually this could tie back into academia a bit and the dark age idea and how we make sense of things over the 20th century, where there's something I don't have a word for yet, which is somebody presents you with a set of ideas.
And they say, these are really good ideas, but the really good ones are the personness of God and the personality of Yahweh.
And they pick out and they say, this is the thing that I believe.
There's the thing that happens, which you can look at the package that they've presented with you and say, wow, this is a beautiful package.
And there is so much truth to be found here, and yet the things that you have pointed out as being the important truths, Are false.
And your theory that you've got some underlying truth packaged together, and then you've got like the bow on top, and you think that what you're presenting is this beautiful bow.
And you're like really, really obsessed with the quality of the bow and how nice it is.
I'm like, okay, I don't like the bow, but there is truth to be found there.
And this is what happens in religion, I think, all the time, because I grew up around it.
There's a whole bunch of people making very insistent claims about history, and they're kind of right.
But if you tell them why they're right, they'll disagree with you and they'll say, no, no, no, that's, you know, you're a heretic, something like that.
Okay.
But do you remember your point about the sage in the cemetery?
Yeah.
Okay.
So some of what religion contains is virus protection.
Right, because religion carries all of this power, the danger of it being captured by something that is either foolish or nefarious is very great.
Yeah.
So it has to have mechanisms built into it to fend off things that would capture that voice.
Taking the Lord's name in vain doesn't mean cursing.
It means speaking with the authority of the Lord when you ain't the Lord, right?
Why is that bad?
Because you can take, you can get people to stop behaving in their own interest and start behaving in your interest if you can get them to do that.
So they have to be resistant to anybody who would try.
So anyway, my point would be the, no, I'm really talking literally, and I'm really talking about a guy, right?
That's a troubling claim to me, as it sounds like it is to you.
On the other hand, you can imagine that if the point is, as soon as you get kind of philosophical about this and you say, well, you know, it's not really supernatural, right?
Once you start playing around with, it's not really supernatural and it's not really a guy and you're not going to a lake of fire and all that stuff.
And the point is the safety is off the gun.
Right?
And what happens next?
For some.
For some.
Well, no, maybe for all of us.
So, I would point out that civilization has lost its goddamn mind.
Obvious.
Right?
And is putting us in tremendous unnecessary danger.
We're taking the most beautiful gift that we could possibly imagine.
Not only are we possessed of consciousness with which to appreciate this beautiful universe, but we have also been handed the tools To make of our time what we will, rather than be obligated to feed ourselves by, you know, tilling the earth or hunting the creatures.
We have the opportunity to use our consciousness for amazing things, not for just getting by.
And we would blow that, we would blow that over this Insanity over whatever the competition, whether it's, you know, COVID madness or nuclear games or, you know, a struggle over oil.
The idea that's so foolish that we would do that, that What I would say is, what are the chances that our insanity, our squandering of the amazing opportunity that we've been handed is actually the result of the fact that we realized you could dispense with an awful lot of the wisdom that was handed to us and nothing bad happens.
The bridges don't fall down, right?
Yeah.
No, God does not flood the earth, right?
So I wonder, I wonder how safe this is and whether or not the people who are focused on the bow are actually also involved in something.
Mind you, I'm not arguing we should go back to those beliefs.
I think they're antiquated.
They don't work.
They're out of phase with our modern problems.
But I do think the reason that people are so reluctant to give them up may be, okay, they're adhering to a belief structure that got us this far, and their point is, if you abandon that belief structure, everything fails.
Well, yes, and I think recent events have played that out.
So again, having grown up in the Christian evangelical community, there was a lot of hostility towards Careful skepticism, I guess, I guess you could say.
And the argument was essentially a moral one that, you know, you let the devil in the door and then he's going to, you know, let his foot in the door and he's going to knock down the house.
And then suddenly you've, you know, you've lost your faith.
And there was lots of arguments, appeals to the slippery slope.
They said, Oh, well, you can't socially allow X because then it's going to allow Y, which is going to allow Z. And they were right about a ton of those things.
I remember, I remember you know, the intellectual community, Back in the day would mock the unsophisticated evangelicals for their arguments and you know where where things are going to go and why they're going that direction and I think history has demonstrated that in a lot of respects they're right.
Now I'm not sure so what I'm not sure is Whether historical peoples believed the interpretations that we ascribe to them, like people like Lawrence Krauss, or Christopher Hitchens, there is a story that is told about the unsophistication of religious thought when taken literally as if that's representative of historical religious thought, and I'm just not sure it is.
Oh, I agree.
I guess my point would be, you know, there's this place where I moderated the debate between Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson.
And they hang up on this question where, you know, Harris is pushing Peterson, and this is my recollection, I hope I have it right, but Harris is pushing Peterson about whether he really believes in, you know, Jesus as divine being, something like that.
Do you really believe?
And Peterson says, I act as if I do.
And Harris Has this reaction like he's just won.
Like Peterson has just admitted something embarrassing or said something that makes no sense.
And the crazy thing is I hear Peterson say that.
And I say, you just answered the question perfectly.
Yeah, that's almost a much stronger answer than to say, I believe it, than to say, I am acting on it.
Right.
And the irony, of course, is to say, I act as if I do, is like one admission.
I'm going to step out of character for 15 seconds, and I'm going to tell you what's really going on here.
I act as if I do.
Now I'm going back into character, right?
And the point is, I only came out of character because you're being a dick about it.
Because you're pushing me.
You're saying, do you really believe?
Do you really believe?
And the point is, if I really believed, I wouldn't say I don't really believe.
But the point is the behavior.
And so anyway, the interchange is interesting because I heard it as if he just spoke literal truth about his own internal state, conveyed it, ended the argument, and Harris heard it as if Harris had just caused an embarrassing revelation.
Which was strange.
Yeah, well, I'm confused about the word act now, because maybe Harris was interpreting that as saying, I am knowingly participating in theater.
I am pretending, as if I do, versus I am acting on the belief.
Like, I act, which means I believe it at a much deeper level.
Well, what I heard him say was effectively, I don't worry too much about Whether I believe or don't quite believe, the point is, I act as if I do, and this doesn't preoccupy me.
Once you're going to be acting as if you believe, then, you know, you don't want to get caught in some infinite loop of what does it really mean that I believe, right?
The point is, you've done the important part.
You've decided, how am I going to make decisions that are tough calls?
I'm going to think about what I would do in light of this set of beliefs, And go forward.
And, you know, if you believe as I do, that those belief systems are adaptive, that they are products of evolution.
Mind you, I think Peterson is making a kind of an error.
And the error is that those belief systems are adaptive, but they are not adapted to our modern environment.
So there's a danger behaving as if God exists made a great deal of sense and it makes less sense every hour because those beliefs are adapted to a past environment.
I just think that that concept of God is so complex and it means such radically different things to so many people.
I don't even think I don't know how responsible it is to say either way, believing in God, not believing in God, because if you take a poll of people who would agree with the sentence, I believe in God, and then you were to scratch the surface and say, what do you mean by that?
You're going to get wildly different answers.
Oh, I agree.
And I think actually this is a tough problem, right?
It's exactly analogous to, uh, You as a philosopher will know what this is called, but the idea that I cannot in any way establish that what I experience when I look at something blue isn't what you experience when you look at something yellow and vice versa.
Now, I can make a strong argument about why that's unlikely to be true, but I can't prove it.
And this, what does somebody really mean when they say they believe, is one of these.
And the basic point is it doesn't really matter as long as a congregation of people that's interacting comes out to the same conclusions about what that belief should imply about behavior.
Okay.
So this has been a wonderful aside, or I don't know, maybe this is the main, main, uh, thread on religion.
I really would love to talk about, uh, go back to something we were talking about a long while ago.
And, um, I think I have an important concept that I would love to run by you.
Good.
Okay.
So I'm trying to think how to bring it back together.
Okay.
If it's the case that we find ourselves in a circumstance in which people who are supposed to be high-quality thinkers are not doing a very good job, and...
And we're pointing out maybe there are big errors over here, big errors over there.
We haven't gone into the history.
Maybe we can do that at some other point.
It's a very rich history here of spectacular errors being made and held onto for long periods of time.
And then only, you know, science only progressing, as they say, coffin by coffin.
Funeral by funeral.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Something like that.
So, okay.
Here's a claim.
There are discoverable patterns of error.
that are apparent across disciplines and they have something in common.
There's a particular way of thinking that I'm starting to see crop up across disciplines that is so universal it makes me think something like we're in a dark age.
And I would describe it as, in a simple way, as underestimating the complexity of the world.
But there's something more technical going on here, which is the process of information loss.
When people are thinking about complex phenomena.
Let me give you an example that I'm recently researching and I think you'll find this interesting.
Okay, this is so funny, right?
So, in the mid-1980s, There was this paper that was published, I forget who the author was, and it was supposed to demonstrate that the supposed hot hand in sports was a fallacy.
It was a mistake.
It's widespread cognitive misfiring.
There is no such thing as the hot hand or getting in the zone.
This even made it into Daniel Kahneman's book, Thinking Fast and Slow.
This was like, wow, a triumph of statistics and math and analysis over what these unsophisticated practitioners believe, which is that you can get in the zone and there is such a thing as a hot hand.
So for multiple decades, the hot hand fallacy was held up as an example of the superiority of, let's call it, Mathematical data analysis over other techniques.
Okay.
Turns out that there is a hot hand fallacy fallacy, which is thinking that by looking at the data and the way that they looked at the data, they could arrive at a conclusion that turns out to be incorrect for a few reasons.
I'll give you a couple of simple examples.
The way that they try to conclude That there is no such thing as the hot hand is by looking at streaks of performance in player performance.
I think it was the person analyzed like one year of the Boston Celtics in basketball and was trying to say, you know, do we see evidence that there are streaks or is it fairly random and there is there is no streaking taking place?
So they did the analysis and they said, oh, well, we looked at the data, which is, of course, the important thing to do.
You look at the data and you draw the conclusion.
I see no evidence of streaks.
Therefore, it's a widespread cognitive illusion.
Well, okay.
It turns out they didn't take into account that defenses in basketball will adjust their behavior based on the performance of the person who's streaking.
So if you look at the data and you don't see a change, you see the same pattern, despite the defense changing, it's double teaming somebody that it wouldn't otherwise do.
That means the person is streaking.
You're looking at the same data, but you're going, oh no, that's actually evidence that there is a streak.
There are other mistakes that are made.
Just in the past 10 years, there's a bunch of research coming out saying, oh, by the way, the hot hand is a thing.
All of those unsophisticated sports people.
Everybody in the domain of sports who has done anything physical will understand that getting in the zone is a thing.
All of sports psychology is about getting in the zone.
And yet, here you have these academics going, You don't understand.
You don't understand the sophisticated mathematics involved.
Okay, so anyways, I bring that up.
Turns out they were wrong.
This is a gigantic embarrassment.
People should be embarrassed.
It looks like they might have even made statistical errors themselves.
Not only was their data mistaken, but they might have essentially made a mistake, a justifiable mistake because of something called the Monty Hall paradox.
I don't know if you're familiar.
Of course.
It's a very extremely unintuitive result in statistics.
It's anti-intuitive.
It's anti-intuitive, though there are pretty good examples.
Once you get the concept, it makes sense of what's going on.
But the first time you encounter it, you're going to go, this is obviously something is broken here.
Anyway, it looks like they sort of might have made a similar error, a subtle error in the paper that was published in 85.
Anyway, so their data is bad quality.
They didn't take into account how defenses adjust.
They might have made statistical errors, and they didn't account for shot placement, where you were on the court.
If you've got a streak and you're making layups versus you're an inch inside the three-point line, you're gonna just lump those into the same thing and then draw.
That's silly.
Okay, so anyway, I bring that up to say, this is the essence of the pattern that keeps happening over and over and over.
It is people trying to do math in systems that are so complex they do not lend themselves to the doing of math.
Why?
Because there is information loss.
There are critical variables that people are not taking into account when they try to do the math.
They try to look at the data, they think the data speaks for itself.
It does not.
If you're not taking into account shot placement, defensive strategy, Whether or not offensive psychology has changed.
There's a whole basket of complex things here that you're not taking into account.
The result is information loss.
Actually, on this note, some of this new evidence that's coming out on hot hand research is showing in a bunch of different domains, yeah, of course, the hot hand is a thing.
No shocker there.
It didn't take 30 years of academic theorizing to figure that out.
One of the approaches to discovering this is by more advanced statistics, where they take into account things like shot placement.
And when you take that variable and you go, okay, well I guess my conclusions didn't follow from my simplistic Assumptions.
It is that pattern, Brett.
That pattern of information loss from abstraction errors that is absolutely everywhere.
It's in math itself.
It's in physics.
It comes up in COVID-related situations.
If I were to say to you, Brett, Don't you know there is a graph, an exponential chart of COVID infections, that that means X, Y, and Z?
And didn't you see the mathematical model that the guy in Oxford came up with?
It's all the same type of error.
Simplistic model of reality because you have less information that you're putting into your models than is out there in the world.
Yeah, so many different places we could go from here.
But yes, I totally resonate with this interpretation and I think there's, as you may well think, there's more to it.
I mean, for one thing, the economic incentives actually foster people not to discover this error because it basically creates a landscape of work to be done that can be remunerated.
But This thing is set in motion, and in fact, in your Dark Age piece, you say something that's very close to something that I often say.
You talk about the tendency to oversimplify, and what I would argue is that part of what is going wrong and why we are so stuck is We made our early gains scientifically in the simple fields.
And that creates a problem because what it does is it causes you to think the rules of science are the rules of science that work for simple fields.
And what simple fields are you talking about?
Chemistry and physics.
Right, right.
Which is unintuitive if people don't, like usually I think people think physics is the most complex.
It's not.
It may be the hardest cognitively, but it's the simplest stuff.
It's just very foreign from our experience.
Control for the most variables.
Right.
So we made our early gains there and then we went, Oh, now we know how to do science.
And when you apply those rules to biology, for example, it's a no-go because the complexity makes those rules laughable.
Right.
Um, and we are not good at correcting for it.
So we haven't updated science.
Um, The other thing is something I haven't heard you mention, which is that, again, at the level of the interface between our scientific practice and the incentives surrounding it, we make this mistake, which I swear causes any field to bog down.
The mistake, first of all, I would argue that diminishing returns, important concepts often get Mislabeled because they get very closely associated with the first place that they were spotted.
So I would argue diminishing marginal returns is one of the most important complex systems concepts in the universe.
And that it's overly associated with economics, which is the first place it was seen, ironically, because economics is simple enough to see it.
Right?
The point is, diminishing returns ought to afflict any system that has two characteristics.
Complexity and an objective.
So there's no diminishing returns in a hurricane.
There's complexity, but there's no objective, right?
But if you've got an objective, against which to define something like a return, and complexity, you'll see diminishing returns.
So here's my point.
Let's say you've got a field.
Field X.
Somebody comes up with an insight in field X that's really important, right?
The next important thing has been discovered.
A flurry of work happens that's all very productive, okay?
This causes the field to decide that that insight is fundamental and to award the school of thought that owns that insight, all of the resources, because the return on investment is so big, right?
Who else would you give them to?
These are the people who have the hot hands, right?
Okay.
Now you've given all of the resources to the school of thought that had this insight.
That insight is going to peter out.
It's going to hit diminishing returns.
That school of thought is now the only game in town.
Every other school of thought dies off.
Nobody remembers how to do it.
And eventually, the school of thought hits a plateau.
And the point is, well, we're just going to keep doubling down because we know we're right, because look how productive we've been, right?
And the point is, no, you should never have edited down to one school of thought, right?
At the very least, yes, you would be slower when the flurry of progress is happening.
You'd be slower if you had at least two schools of thought live.
But at the point that your school of thought peters out, you need the next most promising school of thought to tell you what to do next.
And we never do this.
So every field is almost always stuck.
There's an immediate analogy here to the process of thinking critically.
If you have not arrived at the truth and you have plausible theory A that is totally incommensurate with plausible theory B, Just because you're preferring A now doesn't mean you throw B away or C or D. You go, okay, well, maybe there are many different, maybe there are concepts in the different theories that are going to piece together the thing I'm missing in the dominant theory.
And that's sort of the same thing that you're describing here, just at like an institutional level.
At an individual level.
Yes, exactly.
And I would argue one of, uh, I hope this doesn't sound like bragging, but one of the things that I think I do lots of stuff badly, but one of the things I think I do best.
You're an ape, Brett.
Don't worry.
I am extremely patient if I don't know the answer to a question, right?
I can take a question and I can file it in an incomplete state and I can wait a decade.
Yeah.
And you have to be able to do that because if you feel pressure and you take the closest thing you've got to an answer and you force it to be an answer, then you end up, A, missing the answer when you finally have enough pieces of the puzzle to get it right.
You don't even know you're still asking, right?
You think you knew the answer, and so you reject the real answer.
So anyway, it's like two schools of thought in your mind, and I literally believe that being of two minds is downstream, that consciousness evolved to allow two people to pool cognitive resources, but that as a secondary effect, the ability for one person to do it with themself is a secondary adaptation.
So yeah, I really like that idea.
And if you pursue that approach, not just with two ideas, but with, you know, you have five different theoretical explanations for something.
And then one of the, one of them is like a basket for all the other possible theoretical things that you're not thinking of right now, but maybe you could approach it differently.
That pays returns.
Cause I've experienced, I've done this the wrong way several times where I was like, oh, I just really assumed that X was true and was building, building, building.
And then my cavalierness bit me in the butt later where I go, okay, actually that, that little one critical assumption I thought was reasonable turns out to be wrong.
And I sort of got to start from scratch, but I've also experienced that in return where I go, you know, if I'm being honest, I'm like 90% confident about this aspect of a theory.
I don't know, but I'm just going to keep the door open a little bit.
Maybe you could have a wild alternative theory and then time passes and time passes and you go, oh, you know, I'm glad I kept the door open here because I already have models built that alternative models built out where necessary.
Totally.
Totally.
And it becomes, uh, it becomes an art, you know, where, you know, there's a, there's a Bayesian aspect of this where, you know, yes, I think this is probably the right explanation There's something about it that's bugging me.
And I'm going to proceed as if it's true, but I'm going to keep track of what's stacked on top of it.
So if it turns out it isn't true, I immediately know what else I believe that I need to go back and check.
Exactly.
Now the consequences of that, the consequences of that though, are you have to seriously entertain wildly different schools of thought about any given idea, which people do not seem comfortable with at all.
If you're going to say, okay, I recognize, you know, I'm making my Jenga tower and this one, this one I might not be able to build on.
There can be a whole lot of Jenga blocks, a whole lot of people, decades of theory and money and prestige on the line, and that one might be wrong, and you pull it out and you go, okay, look, I've already got a separate system, I'm not going to be devastated, but there are big stakes involved if you keep track of what follows from what.
Right.
And the world is not set up for this, right?
No.
You have stacked a discipline on top of a risky assumption, and then that assumption comes up bad.
The institution, the subject, all of the people involved will rationalize pretending that the thing that they now know isn't true is true in order just to keep the artifice running.
Yes, and sometimes in shocking ways.
This happens in medical science.
There are a lot of bad domains of scientific inquiry, but if I had to say on net what has the most immediate negative impact on people's lives, I think it's medicine.
I think modern medicine has all kinds of Terrible ideas that are damaging people.
It's a killer.
Yeah, it's a killer.
For real.
But to describe this process of rationalization, I have heard people say, effectively, we have to speak about our errors, paraphrasing, you have to speak about our errors in a muted voice.
Otherwise, the masses will lose faith in us.
The credibility of science is on the line.
Right.
And say that as if they're, you know, they're the, the keepers of, of the truth.
Well, and like the people, you know, I can understand the reasoning.
I just think it's, it's really bad.
I think it's a really, really bad idea.
All right.
So, um, we are incidentally talking around and around and around, uh, the dark age.
Um, and we will get there now or next time, but, um, but the, uh, here, here's what, here's the problem or one of the fundamental problems.
Think about, for the moment, just think about cultural evolution as an analog to genetic evolution.
Take Dawkins' modern view of it.
Just say it's an analog.
Okay?
Okay.
Well, there's an analog then to mutation rate.
Yeah.
Culture is very creative and experimental compared to genes, right?
But that means it is producing new variants at a furious pace.
But they go extinct really quick because they're almost all wrong, right?
Now, here's the problem.
The glory of science, the beauty of it, the power of science comes from the fact that given enough runway, It is a self-correcting process that gives us insight.
The day-to-day back and forth in any given department or field or journal or whatever is near noise.
And the problem is, because these two things go by the same name, science is that which we have learned through this process.
And science is also the furious, buzzing process that produces that knowledge.
Because we think of those as the same thing, We have this urge to take whatever just came out of the lab and put it in the New York Times and tell you how to change your diet.
And the point is, you just came up with that.
You don't know if it's true.
I get that you have an experiment that says it's true.
And five years ago, there was the experiment in the New York Times saying the exact opposite.
Right.
And so the point is, Science, if you take the latest, the latest science is nuts.
The science that has stood the test of time is science you might want to put your weight on.
But the last thing you want is your doctor or your nutritionist I completely agree.
the latest insights and applying them to you, you'll get mauled, you'll get maimed.
You know, it's a terrible idea.
I completely agree.
I don't know if this is a good idea or a bad idea, but there are enormous connections between what you've just said and how markets function.
So there's a lot of criticism that people throw at markets where they're looking at the short term and they're saying, ah, but look, the market produced dangerous good X.
Therefore, we need some type of state intervention to correct this process.
And then, market adherence will say, no, no, but in the long run, when you zoom out in the big picture, it is a self-corrective mechanism, which I actually believe to be true.
The pessimistic conclusion is the most accurate one, that yeah, science might be a self-correcting process, but if you're talking in 150-year cycles.
And yeah, I do think the profit and loss incentive in a market is sufficient to punish bad behavior such that In the long run, bad products will be out-competed by good ones.
But in the short run, that might be decades of some dangerous thing being sold on the market that has unintended consequences we didn't understand.
And I don't think that there is a good resolution to that.
From what I can tell, I think the approach that We're going to have a state come in and regulate the companies to prevent the dangerous products from being sold.
It's sort of like having a state of academics, composed of academics, come in and say, no, no, no, we have to now set the record straight of the ideas.
And we're not going to let the self-corrective process happen.
I think there's a lot of similarities here.
Totally.
And you can see the disaster with COVID, right?
So, okay.
They took a virus and they enhanced it for human infectivity for whatever garbage reason they came up with.
That couldn't possibly be a good idea, right?
It's nothing that could be true that would have made that a good gamble.
But they did it and it got out and it made lots of people sick and killed lots and lots of people and I believe the full toll of that virus is far from understood.
But then, we got it!
We've got this brand new vaccine.
It's based on an entirely new technology.
And this cartoon that describes how it works says exactly why it's going to make you safe and you're going to get to go back to life.
I looked at that.
Heather and I looked at the description of this.
I agree.
It is a technologically marvelous new mechanism for informing the immune system.
It's so far from ready to inject into a human being.
Or a billion.
Well, that's just the thing.
I wouldn't inject it into one human being, given how many unknowns, as you say, the, um, The degree to which they lost sight that they did not recognize the complexity or didn't care.
Oh man.
Of what they were, the intervention they were proposing and how radically different this was from anything that they had done successfully before, right?
That was just a shocker and then the idea that they wanted to vaccinate everybody was like, First, we vaccinate the world.
Could you come up with a worse concept in biology than that?
Let's take a novel vaccine that affects the most complex system in the known universe, which is the human body, in ways we don't understand and try to give it to everybody.
Let's put it this way.
I mean, A, you knew they were insane when they started with the idea that they were going to vaccinate all the frontline workers.
How about half?
How about we just start with half, right?
You don't want to take all of anything and gamble it on this experiment, right?
These are people so remote from the level of complexity they are intervening with that they couldn't I'm struggling to find words to explain how irresponsible this was, even if there was no evidence in the trials that there was anything to worry about.
Right.
Right.
This level of novelty with all of humanity, I'm sorry, that is just... It's crazy.
It's unimaginably dangerous.
We're kind of in an interesting zone here that I can't think of any other comparable time that I've experienced and probably nobody has experienced in this lifetime, which is If you're correct, and I would say in this case, if I'm correct, that the cost-benefit was extremely bad, it was outrageously risky, then in the long run, I think more time is going to reveal this.
Consequences from intervening to the immune system might not be known for two decades, three decades.
It's an interesting position to be in, though, because it's almost like If you want to put your theory to the test, this is a great time to do it.
Because how many times could you say with confidence, I think there was a historic error has been made here that we have not seen the full consequences They're up.
That doesn't happen very much.
So it's kind of, it's in a weird, in an intellectual sense, it's kind of an interesting opportunity.
Like I happen to think intervening in complex systems is probably not a good idea.
That's true economically, biologically, politically, you know, culturally.
And in this case, because it was such a spectacular intervention, like unprecedented intervention, my guess would be we're going to have an unprecedented disaster unfold because of it over the next few decades.
Yeah, and I'm open to being wrong.
It'll be interesting to see if that plays out.
That's true.
It does not have to be the case that a disaster is revealed in order for it to have been unconscionable.
Sure, sure.
It could have been Russian roulette and...
Well, there's two claims.
The one claim is it was like a immoral decision and foolish.
And the other claim is like a causal claim that the output is actually going to be very bad.
Well, I think we already, I mean, it's interesting to me that you're cautious about saying, I think we already see, you know, especially with the mRNA, Uh, transfection agents, we already see an impact on all cause mortality that causes the return to be negative.
And that's only a couple, that's a year and a half out from the beginning.
Well, so, so the reason I'm being cautious is because the, uh, if you're, if you're trying to look at the scope of possible disaster, yep.
To have an increase, all cause mortality bump will make the history books, but it's not like, it's not like, Oh my gosh, this is black plague.
Yep.
This goes all the way to genuinely unprecedented disaster for humanity.
I'm not saying that's what's going to happen, I don't know, but that's actually on the table.
It's all on the table.
It's all on the table.
But I just want to point out, if they had gambled recklessly and gotten lucky, that would not be a vindication of their mechanism of decision-making, right?
And I mean, you know, in fact, we're stuck in this position with respect to COVID itself.
We are now battling.
We had won the battle over LabLeak, and now there's this full court press to reverse the story and say, oh, actually, it really did come from the seafood market.
It's nonsense.
The evidence is not there to suggest a reversal of this conclusion at all.
But what people don't realize is that we are having a proxy battle over whether the right thing to do is to stop gain-of-function research or quadruple it.
Right?
Because if it did come out of the wet market, then the laboratory across the river wasn't fast enough.
It didn't have enough money.
It should have studied harder because maybe we could have prevented it.
Right?
And if it did come out of the laboratory, then the point is, well, the wet market wasn't the concern.
It was the goddamn laboratory.
You did this.
It's a self-inflicted wound.
That's literally the same process of Keynesian reasoning in economics.
The idea that the government needs to intervene to stimulate the economy, and then when the stimulation doesn't work, they say, well, we didn't stimulate enough.
In fact, thank goodness we stimulated it, because it would have been worse if we didn't stimulate.
So next time, we need a quadruple dose to really get the economy going.
It's the same reasoning.
It's Pfizer logic before Pfizer.
Yeah, well, oh man.
How much time do you have?
I have about 20 minutes or so.
Okay.
Shall we switch into, instead of talking around the Dark Age question, shall we at least open that?
Sure.
Yeah.
The thing that I am unsure about is to gauge the depth versus breadth, because there's a lot of both here that's really interesting.
So, yeah.
Stop me if I'm going down rabbit holes, if you want to talk specifics.
Oh, the rabbits will stop you.
Okay.
Yeah.
They don't take kindly to people coming down their holes.
I know that.
No, go ahead.
Oh, do you want me to?
Oh yeah.
I thought it was going to be a prompt of some sort.
Yeah.
Yeah.
A prompt.
Well, okay.
So as we discussed at the top of the podcast, you have argued, so I have long believed that we were in a dark age.
I were in a cryptic dark age that one was dawning.
I have my own set of terminology surrounding this.
I call, I would argue that every dark age has people who continue to do science that they can be very obscure.
Oftentimes their entire product is probably lost to history.
I call these keepers of the flame.
And so there's that.
But in any case, the degree to which science has been unhooked by market forces and replaced by things that, you know, basically cargo cult science, to use Feynman's terminology for it, is extreme.
It has grown even much more extreme than when I started thinking about this.
But when I ran into your work and I found that A, I'm not the only person on earth who thinks that dark age is not too strong a term, but B, what really surprised me about your work was how long into the past you believe that process has been going on.
You put the start date of our Dark Age way earlier than I would have even thought to place it.
And so, let's talk a little bit about why you think we're in a Dark Age, and when you think it started, what changed, and why so early.
The first part of the question, the reason I think we're in a dark age is because I have taken seriously people's claims in a bunch of different domains and keep asking them questions why they believe what they believe, because I find their conclusions very unintuitive and I'm trying to learn.
And I found that a lot of times they're appealing to ideas that seem highly dubious, And they find their origins in the first part of the 20th century across disciplines.
So I'm trying to make sense of some spectacular claims.
I'm sure you've heard people make some incredible claim about reality and they say, well, as we learned from quantum mechanics, things can be in a mutually exclusive state at the same time.
What does that mean?
That's a shocking claim.
So you look into it and you look into it and you go, okay, well, there's this thing called the Copenhagen interpretation that was established, blah, blah, blah.
Same thing happens in mathematics.
I don't know if, uh, you know, uh, how familiar are with some of these concepts, but there's this notion of the infinite set in mathematics.
The idea that there is a set of numbers, which is infinite in size, that there are, uh, infinitary processes that can be completed.
It's a shocking claim.
Interesting.
So you investigate, investigate, you find, okay, a lot of these ideas were established the same general time period.
And so I started to see patterns of really bad ideas at present seem to have their origins around the same time period.
I'm going to put it somewhere around 1880.
to somewhere around 1950.
A lot was happening at that time.
So in terms of ideas, for me, this may be incorrect.
There's one exception where the story might go back further, but let's just say it starts at roughly 1880.
The reason we had a bunch of bad ideas established around then is because for the previous few thousand years, our mathematics was more or less built on concepts that came from Euclidean geometry.
I'll It was fashionable to think, a lot of people have thought throughout history, that Euclidean geometry was the same thing as geometry.
There is one geometry, it is Euclidean geometry.
And why are advanced mathematical ideas get their justification through Euclidean geometry?
Well, what happened around this time period was the development of non-Euclidean geometries.
Which a lot of people said, okay, well, if there are non-Euclidean geometries, what actually is the foundations of math?
We assumed it was Euclidean geometry, which is based in self-evident principles, self-evident axioms that anybody can use and discover and see why the conclusions follow.
If there are non-Euclidean geometries, maybe we need a different foundation for math.
So there was a, this is not just my opinion, there was a, let's call it a formal academic crisis around the foundations of mathematics that was taking place roughly from, yeah, 1880 to like the 19, yeah, through the 1940s, I think it's fair to say.
Now, a lot of those conversations weren't Ended correctly.
Like, the questions weren't answered.
People asking the questions sort of died out.
They had different schools of thought.
The school of thought that wound up winning didn't have good philosophical answers.
In fact, in practice was kind of anti-philosophical, said, stop asking the questions and then we don't have problems finding answers.
Something very similar happened in physics, where you had a revolution, multiple revolutions at the beginning of the 20th century.
You had the development of relativity, which is a mind-blowing idea to think that gravity is something that comes from the structure of space-time.
What the heck that means, that's a shocking idea.
And then shortly after that, you have the development of quantum mechanics.
Which, among other things, one interpretation of quantum mechanics, called the Copenhagen Interpretation, says that there is no such thing as an observation-independent reality.
So we can't talk about nature in some state outside of what is being measured.
That's a shocking claim.
If that's true, that is an absolutely mind-blowing claim.
And I think it turns out to be false.
And so if you have deep conversations with people who have sometimes wild-sounding ideas, you would be shocked to find how many of their wild ideas are somehow justified in Uh, either physics and the Copenhagen interpretation.
Oh, reality is contradictory.
So therefore I can be contradictory or even in concepts in mathematics.
Now I have had multiple conversations recorded on my podcast with professors going around, uh, trying to root out the source of a lot of these bad ideas.
And I have had people tell me on my show that they've given me examples of existent logical contradictions.
One of them was the infinite set.
I spoke with a philosopher at Columbia, or I was a philosopher of mathematics.
And we were talking about whether or not there could be logical contradictions, because that's a shocking claim if there are.
And he said, oh yeah, there are logical contradictions.
Like, for example, the infinite set is kind of a logical contradiction.
Now, he was saying the infinite set is a contradictory concept in defense of it, which is an interesting position to take.
I was just mind blown that somebody would say that with a straight face.
There was, in fact, a whole school of thoughts called the dialetheist school, which says there are actually existent logical contradictions.
You can there's a couple examples like the liar's paradox.
This sentence is false.
The way that they try to handle the liar's paradox is by saying it is true and false at the same time, whatever that means.
So sort of explode logic to try to defend the existence of a real paradox.
So anyway, I'm examined, I'm examining bad ideas and I find myself, I keep coming to people keep appealing to the ideas that were established around the turn of 20th century.
So and then I look at those ideas and I go, OK, well, there were there was some prominent people that came up with the Copenhagen interpretation, Niels Bohr, for example.
There were some notable dissidents.
Einstein would be an example of somebody who's notorious for rejecting some of the more wild implications of the Copenhagen Interpretation.
And Einstein made better arguments, but Niels Bohr won out.
So, the same thing happened in mathematics around the same time.
You had different schools of thought, the logicists, the formalists, and the intuitionists.
Formalists won out, but better ideas, in my estimation, were made by the other schools.
The logicists, who said that mathematics is an extension of logic, that's where mathematical truth comes from, is logic.
The intuition had said, well, there is not necessarily objective truth in mathematics.
Mathematics is all constructed in the mind.
The objects of mathematics are objects in our mind.
And I think they have some aspect of the truth.
But anyway, the worst position of all was the formalists.
And they said, listen, what we have to do is explicitly strip meaning out of mathematics.
We have powerful structures of math that allow us to explain something in the world.
We can use the math, we can apply the math, but when you start asking the philosophical questions, we run into paradoxes, so stop asking them.
So, I see that as, well, that's a very big problem.
Now, you also had, in the early 20th century, you had economic and political revolutions at the same time.
So, you had communist revolutions, you had, in that time period, in that 70 years, you had two world wars.
That was sort of world-defining, world-shaping.
You had the establishment, the latter half of the 19th century, you had the germ theory of disease was taking off, was being developed.
You had Keynesianism in the 1930s, like I said.
So the reason I am seeing that my best explanation for the dark age that we're in, if you were to peer into the mind of the believers of really bad ideas that seem to say really silly things all the time, and you were to try to figure out where those ideas come from, I'm seeing tons of connections and you were to try to figure out where those ideas come from, I'm seeing tons of connections to that 70-year time period from 1880 and 1950, where it was
Electrification was happening, you know, there was a lot going on then.
Okay.
So that's the version, yeah.
I think you've put some things together for me that I did not understand, and they've touched on another set of concepts I didn't realize was nearby.
So Heather and I were professors for 15 years, and we became quite compelled that one of the biggest obstacles to successful education was The remoteness of physical reality to students, and in specific, we started assigning students
To teach themselves things where success or failure was unambiguous and did not require anyone to tell you whether you had succeeded or failed, right?
In other words, if you set out to build a tower and it falls down, you can't pretend, you know, you could lie to yourself, I guess, but the point is it's obvious it fell down.
If you're trying to fix an engine and it doesn't start, you didn't fix it.
The reason that that's important is that in an environment where everything is socially mediated, where you know that you understood the biology because the person at the front of the room who is the biologist told you you understood it, that's very risky.
Because if the person at the front of the room doesn't understand biology themselves, then you'll do more harm in learning what they think than if you learn nothing.
Right?
So, here's the question.
Our technology progresses to the point that what we think we understand is no longer checkable by very many people.
Right?
I haven't looked deeply into the machinery of cells physically, right?
I've seen major organelles, but I can't do very much to check all of the things that I'm told about cellular biology.
I have to take the cellular biologist's word for it.
And my point is not that they're wrong.
I'm sure they're wrong in some ways.
I'm sure they're right in other ways.
But the point is, once you're looking at things that are sufficiently small that you need high-tech mechanisms to allow you any insight into what's there at all, you're now running new risks that what you're being told is true isn't true, and that your intuition, that can't be true because it's not what I've seen.
You know, when I've looked into cells, I haven't seen that process.
Well, you haven't looked into cells.
Right?
So, I guess the question is, is the thing that you're detecting, that early date, the result of the fact that across discipline after discipline, we crossed a threshold where it was impossible for most of the people in the discipline to assess for themselves?
Is this Dick Hart's nightmare?
I think this is a small part of it.
Okay?
The reason I say that is because when you actually engage with the ideas that were being discussed, even if they're abstract ideas, In some circumstances, you don't need the empirical verification.
I think what you're saying is critically important for even making predictions.
If you can find a discipline which is more connected to real-world feedback, i.e., you are going to find a discipline that has better quality ideas than one which has no real-world feedback.
This is true also in the martial arts.
It's true everywhere.
But when I look at the debate between Niels Bohr and Einstein, I don't see something that can only be resolved empirically.
There are trivial conceptual errors that are made that still did not seem to change the social influence, let's say, of the wielders of the bad ideas.
I'm not, I think I'm making a slightly more subtle point than that.
Okay.
It's not, it's again a taking the safety off the gun issue.
It's not that as soon as people can't check that the rate of errors goes way up.
It's that as soon as people can't check, the likelihood of important errors being caught goes down.
And the degree to which a persuasive person who is incorrect continues to have influence goes up.
And so I guess the point is, nature bats last.
The world is the arbiter of whether a scientific or the universe is the arbiter of whether a scientific idea is correct or not based on predictive power of that concept.
And the degree to which we are taking people's word for what has been established or falsified is now overwhelming.
That is definitely going on, but I'll still push back here.
So in what you've just articulated, it sounds like you would say, correct me if I'm wrong, because maybe this is where we have a disagreement.
It sounds like you would say something like, if a empirical experiment could demonstrate that one idea is a lot better than another idea, that is sufficient to have the better idea win out in the short run
um you know there's a lot built into what exactly we're using but you know in the long run predictive power is the only tool we have for assessing the relative merit of competing ideas and In the short run though, because in the grand scheme of things, we're talking over the 20th century, this is the short run.
It sounds like what you're saying is if we had a way to simply test whether or not a particular theory was true or false, that would itself solve a lot of these problems because the assumption is The academics would recognize when an idea has been invalidated.
No, I don't know how to convey it, but imagine for a second that there was a planet that you were going to become expert, you and 50 other students were going to become expert on the social goings-on on a planet that you couldn't visit or watch directly.
And basically, how were you going to become an expert on this?
Well, different people who had been there were going to come into the room and they were going to tell you what they'd seen.
And you were going to build a model of the behavior of the creatures on this other planet based on their observations.
And my point is, if you would directly observe that planet, in case you came in who was a fool, You might detect, actually, you know what, I really, that's not what I saw.
I think that person, I'm not going to put a big asterisk on everything that person says, because I'm not sure they know what they're doing.
Right.
But in this other landscape, you might think, well, that person has the fancier degree, the longer publication record.
They speak more persuasively.
And so the point is the errors that get in stick at a level that they should not.
So it's something like the facts of the experience practitioner are not then experienced by another.
Right.
And I look, I'm not a philosopher, but my understanding is this is kind of what drove Descartes crazy was when he realized that the fraction of what he was supposedly, what he fractured, the fraction of what he knew that he was taking on someone else's authority, the danger was immense.
Now, maybe the danger wasn't as big as he thought, because the number of things that have to be true for lots of people who have done the work to be wrong simultaneously, you know, it's unlikely.
But then it becomes true at the beginning of the 20th century when we're dealing with things that require high technology to detect.
And so you see, I think that is part of it.
But, but the, the aspect that I would emphasize is that it is, it is not the case that it would take sophisticated equipment and technology to figure out that a lot of these paradigmatic ideas are wrong.
Oh, I totally agree with this.
And this is the thing I don't get when you do look at these ideas and you discover, you know, look in my field, right?
The idea, That there is only one species per niche.
That two species cannot stably coexist in a niche indefinitely.
One is always superior competitively and it's driving the inferior one to extinction.
Right?
I get how you could see that if you live in the temperate zone.
Nobody who's been to the tropics could believe that and it's unfalsifiable because To the extent that you have 300 trees doing approximately the same thing in the same place, you can always argue that, well, they are competitively distinct as saplings or blah, blah, blah.
Anyway, it's a wrong idea that persists because it sort of sounds intuitively like it ought to be true and people haven't spotted why it's false.
It's not that any biologist is unaware of the number of species of tree doing identical things on a mainland tropical forest.
It's that they don't trust their own understanding well enough to call bullshit.
Okay, that is big.
I don't exactly know what's going on there, but that is a pattern that is across disciplines.
And it's weird because some of these ideas are in the open, spoken about explicitly, and yet there's a disconnect between a recognition of an idea being wrong and a changing of the theory or the culture around that idea.
And I don't understand what's going on there, but I've seen it a bunch of times.
Well, again, let's steel man people who do this.
There are lots of ideas that are not right, but aren't.
So, I wanted to draw a distinction between bad ideas that are just simply wrong, and consequentially bad ideas.
That is to say, ones that cause you to become dumber if you assume they're true.
Like, I think the idea of muscle memory is pretty benign.
It's wrong.
There is no muscle memory, but there's something that works enough like it that for most people's purposes, if you just believe that there's muscle memory and your muscles get good at doing certain things, it's good enough, right?
It's not a consequentially bad idea, except maybe in some narrow disciplines.
Yeah.
But my point would be, if you were to take every idea in biology that wasn't quite right and throw it out, you'd have almost nothing to say, because they're all approximate.
Right?
We don't know biology that well yet.
We're still new at this.
And so there's a resistance.
I personally, even the stuff that I'm using, I don't want somebody nitpicking all of the things that I say and throwing them out on the basis that they're imprecise, because the point is they're good enough, I'm aware that they're not precise, and if I threw out everything that was imprecise, I'd have nothing.
That is the Steel Man version, yes.
That's the Steel Man version.
Yes.
But then the point is, once you buy yourself license, not to throw out a wrong idea because it's good enough for the purposes that you're using it for, and you're keeping track of its imprecision, then you now have license to lie, and to protect your career, and all of these other things, and people use that, and so then you get generations of students that, you know, can't figure out which way's up.
Yes, so, this is really fascinating, and I have seen that pattern repeated many, many times.
And I would just say, describing from the outside as not an academic, there seems to be Some percentage of professional intellectuals know that the stories that they tell and have been told are, strictly speaking, false.
You see this in mathematics all the time.
You're working within a certain set of axioms, but the axioms might not be true.
But then, there's another set of people, maybe students, maybe it's the way that students get taught, I'm not sure, that think that the cherished starting concepts of the discipline or the idea are actually true
And we're sort of building from these rock solid assumptions so that, so with, I have seen this where I'll talk to one mathematician and he's like, it is definitely the case that X, Y, and Z cause ZFC set theory is the one that we're all going to just defend as true.
And you talk to others and they're like, Oh yeah, well that's just convention.
Yeah.
I mean you can have, you know, there are certain conclusions you get from those assumptions and you have different assumptions and you get different conclusions.
So, and I don't, I don't yet quite understand, How this is getting lost in translation.
And it seems to be a big problem because I've also noticed the people who write most passionately and try to harm other people's reputations are those who are in the believer category where they think they're being personally assaulted when their cherished ideas are being entertained as being false.
Those seem to be the people that are in this middle ground between ideas and the general public.
This is like in the media sphere.
I don't know.
I don't know if you've seen that same pattern.
Oh, a hundred percent.
Yeah, the foot soldiers are the true believers in ideas that are imprecise at best.
I was going to say, though, that I think all of this is a consequence of that diminishing returns piece that I was discussing with you because of the way generations of academics happen, right?
So, if early evolutionary biologists came up with the idea that reproductive success was the core of fitness.
And then they teach their students that, and their students are like, yeah, reproductive success, you know, fitness, right?
As if they're the same thing.
And that works really great, because most of the time they're really closely correlated, right?
So the point is, oh, this is fantastically productive if we just assume that they're the same thing.
We, you know, papers galore.
And then the point is, for every puzzle where they're not the same thing, you're now a confused fool.
You don't know what happened because you don't remember that your ancestors made that assumption, so you don't know how to unmake it.
You don't even think it is an assumption.
You think there's sin in it.
That's exactly right.
And so the problem is, the people who remember that they cheated are dead.
Yes.
Their students took it as gospel, and now we're like hunting around in the dark for something really obvious that the ancestor would have been like, oh yeah, that was just approximate.
This is another thing I haven't written about yet, but this is right on, you're hitting the nail right on the head.
It also seems to be, as bad as so many thinkers are, That sometimes the originators of useful concepts were perfectly aware of the limitations of their theory.
Einstein was like this.
He called his own theory potentially a castle in the sky.
My favorite example is the inventor of imaginary numbers.
The square root of negative one.
This was in like the 17th century or something.
So he came up with this concept.
It solves some math problems.
And he used the term, this is a useful fiction.
Like when you really sit down and think about the square root of negative one, how does that, that doesn't make a lot of sense.
But he said, listen, it's a useful fiction incorporated and then you can solve some math problems.
Over time now, we have developed a metaphysics about imaginary numblers and the complex plane and all of these concepts that are built on other concepts that aren't totally sorted out, that even the originator of those ideas would have known are not sorted out.
Yeah, and I must tell you, I mean, you know, I nobody knows the flaws and the imprecisions in my work better than me.
Right.
I'd be a fool to do the work and not have figured out where the places that I'm, you know, if it's going to fail, it's going to fail there.
Right.
Right.
You would do that.
But the point is, you can imagine how, you know, that gets lost.
And that anybody who's like, Oh, that's a great idea.
Doesn't realize you should be a little cautious about that piece.
That's spackle.
You know, that is a huge piece of the puzzle that, that, that idea of the subtlety of being totally lost on future generations.
And then that the subtle, and then the, the tentative ideas becoming dogma that happens everywhere.
And I keep coming back to mathematics.
That's one of my pet subjects I've been researching of late.
Mathematics is shot throughout with conventions.
Conventions, conventions.
And somebody made a decision somewhere, said, OK, we'll just do it this way.
I'm not exactly sure.
But look, we get to a good, you know, just get in the car and we're going to arrive at the destination and stop asking questions.
And then those conventions turn into laws of the universe.
And it's like if you have a secondary You know, if you think, okay, well, what exactly does this concept mean?
They go, what are you talking about?
You can't do this.
This, you're talking about essential, you know, ideas in mathematics.
This is not the thing you apply critical thinking and skepticism to.
Right.
Um, which then, um, creates the following dynamic.
And I know you're going to have to go, maybe we pick this conversation up sooner rather than later, but a stuck field.
is very easy to beat, right?
It's not hard to outthink a field that's talking itself in circles.
However, when you do that, it is not interested in hearing about it.
And in fact, it treats you like you're an absolute crank, right?
Yep.
Yep.
And there's nothing you can do to beat this.
So this is one thing I tell students when they now ask me, you know, I'm really interested in biology.
What should I do?
And it's like, look, you got to decide whether you want to succeed in that field or you really like the subject matter.
Right.
You really like the subject matter.
It's a great era because the field isn't making any progress.
Right.
You can pick your puzzle.
You can have way more than your share.
Right.
But don't expect anybody to listen to you.
You know, that's my.
My favorite mathematician who I think is doing incredibly important work, his name is Norman Weilberger and he's a Canadian, but he was teaching in Australia for most of his career and he just retired and he's got, he's putting his ideas online and he talks about this all the time where he'll get people writing in saying, Oh, I'm really interested in your approach to math.
This makes a lot more sense.
And he says, listen, Go at it, but maybe as an amateur.
Maybe just resign yourself to doing math as an amateur and you're probably not going to get the prestige if you're not willing to play the game that the professionals are playing.
Yeah, it's actually, I can't remember whether we had started the podcast or not, but it's one of the reasons I'm so fascinated by your lack of the usual pedigree for talking about the things that you're talking about.
You're obviously extremely clear-headed and insightful and creative.
Uh, and it does not, as somebody who has seen the dysfunction and has watched it spread and has now seen it in a couple different fields on several different topics, um, the idea that somebody that you, you know, yes, you have to be smart and insightful and creative to do it, but you're going to have to have just a gargantuan helping of independence in order to see past the nonsense.
That's a whole nother, that's a whole nother can of worms.
Uh, the, the influence of The relationship between psychological features and ideas is a fascinating one, and I'm seeing more and more.
It is almost as if academia is a selection mechanism for psychological traits that has very, very little correlation between high-quality ideas, or I should say it has an inverse correlation with independent ideas.
Maybe it's because they're Well, let's put it this way.
I think you're being delicate.
Academia selects for cowardice.
I don't exactly know what's going on, but.
Well, let's put it this way.
I think you're being delicate and academia selects for cowardice.
Yeah.
It absolutely selects for cowardice.
And tenure is supposed to correct for that, but it's too late in the process too.
as And this not only accounts for the unwillingness of people to call out the obvious nonsense in their own fields, but it also accounts for the vulnerability of those fields to invasion by woke nonsense.
Yes.
Okay.
So I got to say one more thing just cause this is funny and I have a little bit of context.
Early on, several years ago when I was doing this, before I really became, before like I started saying outrageous things in multiple disciplines, it was just outrageous things in a few disciplines, I was getting a lot of flack from academics.
And one of the flack that I was getting is they said, Steve, you must think you are a genius.
If you're right, you must be a genius.
And I said, no, no, I have a much more insulting way to frame this.
My claim is that it does not take a genius to figure out that some of these ideas that you think are high quality are low quality.
And I mean that truthfully.
I know this because I've had the experience.
I just, earlier this year, I had a pair of Danish high school students, or the equivalent of high school students over there, and they somehow came across some of my work on mathematics, and they were really intrigued by it.
They reached out to me, and it was a cool experience.
I was talking to them about some really cool philosophical concepts about mathematics, and you could see the wheels were spinning, they were understanding, they said, oh, this makes so much more sense.
I knew my high school person was, you know, the teacher was incorrect.
I said, we're going to write a little paper on these better ideas.
I was like, okay, this is not rocket science.
Now, if it were rocket science, wouldn't those academics feel better about themselves?
Because they would say, listen, you can criticize my ideas, but only if you're a super genius.
If you're some schmo and some self-educated guy on the internet and you can accurately criticize cherished ideas, well, where do you hide behind?
That is a much more devastating situation to be in, which I think is the situation.
If I have anything going for me, it's the independence and I have a healthy, stable relationship that isn't going anywhere.
I can say whatever I want to say and that automatically gives me... I've got that in spades, which means I'm free to make a bunch of outrageous conclusions and not terrified that it's going to destroy me in any way.
That'll say I'm blessed.
The intelligence thing, I don't even think that needs to enter in the discussion.
Well, I used to have my own formulation on this.
I used to tell students that mental horsepower is way overrated.
Way overrated.
If you have less mental horsepower, it will take you longer to solve the problem.
Yes.
You can still solve the problem, and you probably have enough time.
So I told them the three characteristics that you need if you really want to do the transcendent stuff Our audacity, tenacity, and veracity, right?
You have to care a lot about what's true.
You have to be willing to say things that will get you in a huge amount of trouble.
You have to be willing to stick with the damn puzzles, right?
Until they're actually solved.
But those three things are way more important than mental.
And I would go farther with the analogy that just having horsepower and no understanding of what roads are, no understanding of traffic signals, just the ability to go fast is much more likely to result in you driving off a cliff and ending up in a ditch.
Then it is you arriving at this particular destination, you know, on the continent that you're on, which in my opinion is the case.
Intellectually speaking, if you are, if you only have intelligence going for you and you don't have, you know, wisdom or judgment or philosophy, or you're not in the environment to learn how to utilize your mental horsepower, I think you're ending up much farther away from the truth than somebody who has, you know, less intelligence.
is thinking much slower, has even just dogmatically believed what their parents told them.
That person is still going to be closer to truth, I think, than somebody with a horsepower going in the wrong direction.
Oh, totally.
No, it's like, you know, at the core of an engine are explosions.
But if you think, oh, I know what I need.
I need explosions.
No, you really might want to start with a cylinder and a piston and, you know.
All right.
Well, this has been fantastic.
I know you have to go.
I'm looking forward to talking to you again and exploring this further.
But anyway, it's always marvelous to run into people who you've never heard of, who have minds so full of fascinating and obviously important stuff.
Thanks, Brett.
It was a lovely conversation.
Thank you for inviting me on.
You're welcome.
Really appreciate you and keep up the good work.
I'll do.
Where can people find you again?
I'm at steve-patterson.com.
It's probably worth mentioning, I am in the process of starting a research institute called the Natural Philosophy Institute.
I have a website, natphi.org.
There's nothing on there, it's just a wait list.
Right now, I'm finishing up a book project for a client.
Once that's done, hopefully soon, I'm going to transition full-time into producing more content professionally.
