#140 Creators and Their Creations (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 140th in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we discuss the state of the world through an evolutionary lens.*****Our book, A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century, is available everywhere books are sold, and signed copies are available here: https://darvillsbookstore.indielite.orgCheck out our store! Epic tabby, digital book burning, saddle up the dire wolves, and more: https://darkhorsestore.orgHeather’s newsletter, Natura...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast Livestream 140?
140 it is!
Here we are.
Amazing.
So, here is the long and short.
We have just moved On which more next week.
Yeah, we'll talk more about that.
But at the moment, what there is to say is the good news is we've moved so we have all the equipment we need right here.
The bad news is we don't know where it is.
And so the technical difficulties in this episode are liable to be noticeable.
We apologize for that.
We hope you'll bear with us.
In any case, we will correct this as quickly as possible as the bins and cardboard boxes disappear from our lives and the objects return.
Alright, so with that said, do you want to set us in motion?
Yeah.
We will talk more next week about what is happening in our world.
We're going to have a short episode today and we're not going to have a Q&A for a number of technical and other reasons.
However, we are going to end this livestream with a question that had already come in from the people at our wonderful Discord server this week.
Every week we invite them to vote on a question that they most want us to answer.
And because we admire them and had to make a last minute change, we're going to finish off with their question this week in the main episode, and we will be back next week, probably again without a Q&A, but at some point soon things are going to get back in line, in sync, and all those things.
But I wanted to point something out.
Actually, we are doing a Q&A, and usually we do a Q's and A's.
See?
We got a Q&A.
Yeah, it's not a separate stream, though, is it?
No, no, no.
It's going to be on the tail end of this one, just to keep things compact.
Indeed, indeed.
OK, is Odyssey working, Zach?
Okay, so there's chat live on Odyssey if you're watching live.
Cool, you can go over there and join the chat.
And if not, you will be able to find us soon after we're done here.
Everywhere you can normally find podcasts, including Spotify with the video.
And just, you know, all the usual stuff.
Consider checking out our book, Hunter Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, Natural Selections, which is my substack.
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Apologies, our printer is hidden away from us somewhere.
We don't know where at the moment, so we're going to be reading these from my screen here.
Because we don't know where, we don't know if it printed the documents that we sent to it.
Oh, it might.
There might be paper spewing into a box right now.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, that's not how it works, but yeah, that's sort of an amusing We don't know that that's not how it works at this point.
There was a point earlier in our lives when that was not how it worked.
It's easier to assess how things don't work, actually.
There's more to talk about on that topic.
Rather, a lot more.
Okay, so our sponsors this week are Eight Sleep, Ned, and Public Goods, and without further ado, we're going to launch into those.
All right.
Eight Sleep I have to find on my computer here.
Yes, I thought that was going to be easy, but no.
Here we go.
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Brett.
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All right.
Without further ado.
Without further ado, here we are.
Without much ado about Anything at all.
Right, exactly.
I wonder how many titles he went through.
Or if it was even he.
I've recently stumbled into the quadrant of the internet where people debate these things, and I hate to say it, but the skeptics have more, their arguments are stronger than I was expecting.
So, which, we aren't prepared for this conversation at all.
No, we are not.
Are you, the quadrant that you stumbled into, was it the He was a he, but he wasn't the he we think he was, or was it a he was a she, or is it he was a conglomerate?
There are several credible theories.
The basic- Theories, aren't they?
Good point.
Not theories.
Hypotheses.
I don't know what's gotten into me.
I don't either.
Probably a lack of sleep as a result.
Not a net, I think.
Indeed.
No, so there are apparently schools of thought and the central premise on which the skeptic community seems to all agree is that the guy whose name wasn't exactly Shakespeare but was close couldn't possibly have written them based on who he was and what he would have known and whether he was even literate.
And then the question is, well, who did write them?
And there are apparently a couple different schools of thought, whether it was this guy at Oxford, whose name escapes me, or whether it was Francis Bacon, apparently, as a contender.
That I didn't know.
But let's just say you don't want to delve into this unless you're ready to entertain the possibility that much of what you learned in school just ain't right.
Yeah, well, I have delved briefly a long time ago, back when it was like, oh, maybe he was a woman.
But when you raised this issue with me, I don't know, a few months ago, because you had fallen into this particular hole, you found yourself trapped, like a bear trap at the bottom of it, like, I never wanted this, I can't get out.
I said to you, you know, of all of the things, of all of the things that we were told, were certain, that we were taught, as if this, like, you don't have to question this one at all, from school, the idea that maybe William Shakespeare isn't who we thought he was, or he didn't write the stuff, that's, like, really low on the list of things that would plague me.
Like, that's okay.
Right, no.
If that turns out to be true, okay.
Right, what difference does it make?
What difference does it make?
Well, I mean, the problem is it does make a difference.
To some questions, for sure.
Here, let me just be completely transparent about this.
I fell into this rabbit hole.
I returned to this rabbit hole recently when somebody I met… Your leg had healed from the previous fall?
Right, exactly.
I did encounter this, an essay by Curtis Yarvin, who is obviously a very controversial figure.
This is a topic on which he actually does have a kind of a political slant on it.
But anyway, I thought his argument was pretty compelling and it came from the place that I most appreciate, which is he He was ready to just dismiss this nonsense until he started delving and it was like, oh, geez, this is more credible than I thought.
And so he lays out the case for one of the schools of thought.
And he explains why it would make a lot of sense and why it would make a lot of sense of things in Shakespeare, which is why it matters.
It doesn't really matter if some person you don't know wasn't the actual person.
But it was another person.
Right.
Who had a perspective that we now impose different things onto because of our sense of who Shakespeare was.
And so, I think it is very important from the perspective of understanding the content of Shakespeare.
It is not very important from the perspective of somebody who Our only familiarity is through his work and the study of it.
And if it was actually somebody else who we are only familiar with through the study of their work, you know, okay, it's an interesting fact, but it's not.
And for those of us who read some Shakespeare, like, you know, I was a literature major for a couple of years, you know.
Really read some Shakespeare and who admired it and who thought about it.
And we've gone to a number of plays put on by the wonderful Oregon Shakespeare Company down in Ashland, mostly.
Although I also, my parents lived in London.
We went to the Globe a few times and saw a number of Shakespeare plays there.
Even with that level of sort of passing literate familiarity, I'm not a historian, so I don't know who else's historical record will be changed by the fact that they might have been doing all the writing.
And so that's what I meant by who cares.
Like, some people will care, for sure.
But in terms of, oh my god, this destroys everything, like, no, the work is still the work.
I mean, maybe for me this gets down to that question, and this was actually something that was very live.
Very live argument in literature circles back when I was studying literature in school, which was, do you take the work of art on its face, or do you need to incorporate into it an understanding of the moment in time, the personality and biography and developmental trajectory and wealth and other demographics of the person who created the art?
You know, frankly, I can see an argument for either.
And at least in the late 80s, early 90s, when I was engaged in these sorts of when I was forced into these sorts of conversations in college classrooms, it seemed like you had to take one or the other of these positions.
And in terms of if you're if you are in any way interested, compelled by the idea that an art, a piece of art, a work of art once made should be able to stand on its own.
Then the questions about who Shakespeare might actually be, while potentially interesting, while potentially bearing some impact on how other people might interpret it, can be relegated to a different conversation.
You can still assess Much Ado About Nothing, for instance, which is how we got here, on its own recognizance.
Here is why you are 100% slightly wrong.
100% slightly wrong?
100% slightly wrong.
I don't know what that means.
It doesn't mean a damn thing.
You're obviously mostly right.
Before you say this, I will say that there is one thing that I really like about this temporary setup that we've got going here, which is that while it's a little harder for us to look at one another, I can make eye contact with our producer, who is also our 18-year-old son, and we can roll our eyes at each other when you say things like that.
Right, I prefer to bulge my eyes at him if there are things that require that communication, but in any case... But in the old studio, you couldn't do it, we couldn't see him.
Here is why you are 100% slightly wrong.
Were it Bacon...
Were it Bacon, yeah, not Kevin.
Or Delicious Sizzling.
I mean, actually, if it were Kevin Bacon, that would be even more interesting, although Kevin Bacon is less interesting because it would imply time travel, and that would be important, potentially.
But I digress.
This has nothing to do with why I'm 100% slightly wrong.
This has nothing to do with why you're 100% slightly wrong.
You're 100% slightly wrong because were it Bacon, Then the question is, why is this already transcendent figure transcendent in a second modality?
And I believe that you and I spent a year working on the question of how to build a school to generate hyper-competence.
Right?
The kind of hyper-competence we occasionally see in the world.
And I would argue that somebody like Da Vinci, for example, hyper-competent.
And the point is, I personally, I don't believe that has anything to do, could not logically be the result of unusual genes.
What that is, is some sort of unusual trajectory that has caused the right set of skills to accumulate in the right way so that you get the synergies.
And if bacon is a second example of this, then the point is, well, there's nothing more important than figuring out what that juxtaposition of capacities is and where it comes from.
Because if you can produce it for people young enough to get the benefit, the point is we could have more such hyper-competent people.
And there's nothing that could be more important than that.
I absolutely agree with that, but I don't think that that is a rejoinder to what I said with regard to the works of art themselves.
The works themselves, can they be assessed on their own, on their own recognizance is what I said.
And if I continue to say that, I will start to wonder what exactly recognizance is.
Yeah, it's not recognizance, it's on their own merits.
On their own merits, there it is.
On their own merits, That's a separate question from, oh my god, these works of art that have tremendous merit were also produced by someone who framed an understanding of modern science.
Well, yes and no.
I do think that, let's say, for example, it was Bacon, then it imposes, it necessarily imposes a kind of depth on the social implications of Shakespeare, right?
The very deep In the works.
In the works themselves, right?
For somebody who is as logically rigorous as Bacon to find himself as socially deep and insightful as Shakespeare Would, I think, have an implication.
It wouldn't be part of every conversation about the works of Shakespeare, but I just, for me, and, you know, maybe I'm a, you know, a guy interested in things, and I find, you know, the idea of a guy interested in things also socially that insightful.
It's too important a connection for me to view them as distinct.
This is an interesting conversation.
I do feel a little bit like I'm back in a better version of my freshman year literature classes.
Uh, where, you know, the rejoinder and I don't, I don't know that I'm playing devil's advocate here exactly, but maybe I am the rejoinder from those who would say, you know what you like, the art is the art once created.
It, it, it loses, it loses its tether to the creator who, who made it.
And it needs to be able to be assessed on its own.
That doesn't mean that it is best assessed on its own.
That doesn't mean that you wouldn't learn more perhaps about.
Either its creator or maybe even, to some degree, what's in it by comparing it to the other things that the person who made the piece of art made.
But the art itself, the sonnet, the play, whatever, it either is worthy of having been remembered for, I mean, how old is Shakespeare?
600 years?
500 years?
I am embarrassed that I don't remember exactly when Shakespeare was.
Presumably, a reason inherent to the words that he wrote, that we have and continue to learn from and reflect on those words today, that while we could take that in a different direction, we could expand on it if we have additional context that was lost to history for many hundreds of years with a revelation about Shakespeare's identity, that doesn't change the actual work of art.
I'm going to disagree with you, and I'm going to argue that this is about to become very clear.
So, in my opinion, I certainly understand the argument that the art should stand independently of the artist, and I like it.
I just don't believe it for the following reason.
It is possible, let's take music for example.
It is possible to generate, through a formulaic approach to music, things that are irresistible.
They may not be good, but they're irresistible.
Pop music can be done by somebody who understands the tropes and the chord progressions, and you can put together something that You can discover a recipe and repeat the recipe over and over again and have had maybe one original insight or source of creativity or borrow it and just know how to make variations on a theme.
You can do, and they can be so catchy, you know, this song that gets in your mind and you just wish it would go away because it's not even good.
You don't like it, but you can't make it go away.
That is a possibility in music.
And so what I would argue is, you know, like, as we argue in the book, We are watching the junkification of all sorts of important things, right?
From food to sex to friendship, all of these things are being reduced to a terrible version of these, a low quality, low depth version.
And the problem is I would argue that you should be very cautious about what music you let into your mind because it's so potent.
Right music is so potent it's selling an idea of convincing you of things that may or may not be true and that really in part.
You know, when I listen to, for example, say, Arctic Monkeys.
Arctic Monkeys, if you listen across many songs, you get a sense for their moral position, their intellectual position.
And when they then take an approach that is surprising, you can hear what it must mean, in what context it exists.
But that's a different argument.
Does a single example of a creator's art Uh, fully represent what they can do versus assessing their entire oeuvre, right?
So, you know, that's quite different.
You haven't said anything to me, nor do I know anything about it.
I couldn't even name or tell you how many people are in the Arctic Monkeys.
Yeah, I couldn't either.
Right?
So I think that actually does not, I don't know that it doesn't counter your point, but it doesn't support your point.
Well, I think it supports it in a sense, because if it is true that the art ought to stand on its own, then each of the pieces probably ought to stand on their own, too, and they don't.
That's my point, is that the context of the... No, no, no, no.
That claim that you just made suggests that an artist, a creator, needs to have every single thing that they put out into the world be excellent.
No, no, no, not at all.
Not at all.
All I'm saying is that When you allow music into your mind, you ought to be cautious about it and over time you might develop trust for an artist who has brought you insights that stand up, right?
Music that doesn't turn, you know, tinny and awful after the fourth listening, right?
So, you're extending a kind of trust.
And my point is that that trust, as the ice gets thicker, the willingness to entertain things that that artist delivers should go up, right?
At least it's my experience that it does go up.
As somebody produces high quality stuff, I'm willing to, you know, to give them more rope effectively.
But that has to do with it being created by the same person without requiring any knowledge about who that person is.
I agree.
I agree.
I really think it's a different argument.
It's not wholly different because you can learn about who the people are by virtue of their product.
And I suppose if we had no idea who Shakespeare was, we just didn't know, we found all of the documents with no understanding of where they came from, then you could infer something about the person.
And in fact, that would be a good exercise.
How does Shakespeare look different?
If you don't start from an understanding of who the author was supposed to be, if you started from here's the sum total of everything we know that they produced, now who are they?
Then the question is, well, actually, which kind of person does it point to?
Does it point to Oxford?
Does it point to Bacon?
That is at least how I was exposed to Shakespeare.
I suspect that that's true for most people.
First, we're going to talk about this guy and the fact that he created a bunch of stuff, and then we're going to throw you into some plays.
Like, no, here's Hamlet.
Read it.
Oh, God, really?
That's hard.
I'm only in eighth grade.
How am I supposed to get through that?
It happens in a way that I don't think is terrific often.
Some people have reported learning, being exposed to Shakespeare in a really brilliant way, usually probably by actually going to the theater.
And, you know, actually seeing it as opposed to reading the words in the sort of dead form on the page.
But again, you know, saying, oh, if, you know, if you like that thing by him, you're probably going to like this thing by him is not the same thing as saying, oh, you need to know something about the man who created it in order to appreciate it.
It's really quite different, like recognizing that there is an identity, that there is an artist, that there is a creator.
And that that creator made these things over here, A through D, and didn't do these things over here, E through H, is quite different from saying you need to know a lot of things that are true about that person and then inform your appreciation of his art with the other things that you know to be true.
That's a very different argument.
Well, what do we do, though, with Joseph Heller, for example?
What do we do with Joseph Heller?
Yeah, what do we do with Joseph Heller?
So, I will say, as you start, the only thing I know about Joseph Heller is that, while I'm sure he wrote many things, he's famous for one long piece of narrative fiction.
Right.
Forget the other works.
My feeling is he wrote a transcendent work and I haven't read anything else by him.
I don't know if they're underrated or overrated or he really wrote one great thing.
My feeling is you write one thing as good as Catch-22 and you've contributed so much more than the average person contributes to humanity that, you know, you've done your part.
Anything else you do is gravy, right?
But my basic question was the fact that Joseph Heller went to war and then wrote the dark satire about war that he wrote Places it in a very different context if he was a peacenik.
As you read Catch-22 I'm trying to, so I've read it a few times.
I'm trying to remember the first time I read it.
Did I know as I read it that Does he know war?
Does the author here know war?
And I think that there are some, and this is going to be different for 2D or 3D or many musical artists, musicians as well, but for authors, for artists of letters, there will often be a question.
Especially for authors of fiction and poetry, right?
Where from does this insight come?
Is this abstract?
Is this academic knowledge?
Or was this man in the trenches?
Right.
I mean, what do we do with him?
I don't think there's anything we need to do with him per se, but you can find that book, Transcendent, and yet I don't know.
If there's anyone who's ever read it, and not, if they didn't know at the beginning, at some point while reading it, be driven to discover on their own, you know, did this man go to war?
Yeah.
That's true.
I think also Michael Lewis, if we think about what he has contributed, Liars, Poker... I haven't read any of his stuff, so I can't say as much about him.
You're now causing me to doubt that I have the right name.
I think I do have the right name.
I think that's right.
I just haven't.
But in any case, what he reports, you know, in the same way that Joseph Heller tells us something incredibly alarming about bureaucracy in the context of life and death, right?
Lewis tells us something shocking about the games that are played economically in and around everything we care about.
In other words, if you If you did not, if he had not seen it on the inside, or you didn't know who wrote this, and it could be made up, the point is, how plausible is this?
Much less plausible.
It's shocking.
It's maybe beyond the pale if it's written by somebody who wouldn't know, because they've never been in the game.
But when it's written by somebody who was in the game, and the point is, oh my God, does this explain what we see?
And so anyway, all I'm arguing is... There's a particular type of fiction.
I think that you have identified two examples of with Liar's Poker and with Catch-22, wherein the suspension of disbelief Maybe that's not quite the right phrase, but the reader need not suspend as much disbelief if they do have on board an understanding of actually the author here knows where if he speaks.
Yeah, that's basically the argument.
I'm not arguing.
I would like art that stands on its own.
In fact, maybe you can argue that the question is how close have you gotten to that, right?
When you've written something that is that the verisimilitude is so good that it stands on its own because people will infer that you must know what you're talking about.
Um, then, then that's the ideal.
On the other hand, maybe the problem is some things are so remote from our experience or, you know, from the experience of normal people living normal lives that you would maybe never interpret the, uh, the kind of ruthlessness that happens when life and death decisions are made in a boardroom.
Uh, unless somebody who had seen it had decided to reveal that through something artistic.
You know, there's a, what occurs to me is there's, there's a modern case that, excuse me, that we hear about a lot, uh, from the activists who land on the opposites, opposite conclusion as, as I will here.
And it's J.K.
Rowling, right?
So, uh, you know, J.K.
Rowling's origin story by the time I, you know, we actually, We weren't reading them as they were coming out, even though we were adults by then, and we had friends who were saying, oh my god, the Harry Potter books are extraordinary.
But we read them to our boys when they were young some number of years later, and I've actually gone back and read them, and we've watched the movies, and they're brilliant.
She's extraordinary.
She's created not just a universe, but a suite of characters and insights into the human condition.
She's revealed insights into the human condition.
That are truly powerful.
And at the point that she is long past that, and she is now often writing under a pen name.
And yes, you know, by book three or four, probably we knew that actually she wrote the first book as a single mother on the dole, I think, or whatever it's called in the UK.
And that she was doing this, you know, in her spare moments while trying to support her child.
Feels like it just, you know, it just, it sort of elevates our sense of oh she, you know, she really had it in her.
She had this book in her and then it turns out she had all these other books in her.
But that isn't that relevant, honestly.
That speaks to her tenacity and that speaks to her I guess her tenacity, really.
But the thing that comes out more recently, that she's standing up for the truly obvious conclusion that women are women and men aren't, and that this has enraged an army of activist online trolls, for want of a better description, who proclaim with tears in their I don't even know.
I was going to say pink-haired.
I don't even know.
Probably eyes, though.
I was going to say eyes.
What do they do to their eyes?
I don't think they can do anything to their eyes yet.
They can have their pink hair blocking them.
Their pink hair obscured eyes.
Maybe a unicorn.
I don't even know.
People who are saying, I grew up with you.
The Harry Potter universe was the thing that meant everything to me, and now I know that the creator is a TERF.
And trans-exclusionary radical feminist.
And how dare you, J.K.
Rowling, destroy the Harry Potter universe for me by saying that women are women.
I mean, the number of twists of logic in there, or just failures of logic, is extraordinary.
I think I maybe wouldn't have even thought to attribute her connection to reality to my appreciation of the books, but for the sturm und drang of the activists.
But the more tearful and fretful and anxiety-laden they get over the fact that the author of this amazing series isn't what they thought she was somehow, or what they assumed she was, the more I think, actually, That fits.
Of course J.K.
Rowling knows what reality is.
How else could she have written such a fantastical and yet true to humanity universe?
Yeah, how could you reveal things about reality in a fictional, a highly fictional universe in which the rules don't even, the natural rules of the real universe don't apply.
That takes real skill and insight.
I will point out that you said that she's a TERF.
Only halfway there because she's also a star.
She's an astral turf.
Astral turf.
Yeah.
Um, but I love this point you're making.
Are you happy with yourself?
Sorry, you know, moderately, but I loved, I love the point that you're making.
It is the, it is the counterpoint to, uh, to the one that I'm making naturally, which is, um, If it is true that the context, the person and the life that they led is relevant to interpreting the work in many cases, or at least in some cases I think we've established,
It is not true that at the point that you discover that somebody who has written something truly marvelous has some belief that you're politically not lined up with, that it invalidates the work that they've done.
In fact, you know that you're at odds with yourself.
What you should really be saying is how interesting that somebody whose work I value has this very different belief from me on this topic, which doesn't make them right and me wrong, but it certainly means that I need to listen carefully and figure out why I disagree with this person and what the implications are.
And this, so what I was going to ask you earlier too was, okay, if you think it's necessary or it's almost always valuable to know something about basically the personal background of the creator of works of art, do you feel the same way about works of science?
And before you answer that, what you just reminded me of was, you know, let's think about the early 20th century and how many powerful figures in both science and art turn out to have been anti-Semitic fascists actually, right?
Like, you know, we have like Wagner over in music and boy, I'm forgetting all of the You know, the scientists with truly horrible beliefs who contributed greatly to science.
Yeah, Fisher.
Fisher, good.
Okay, so let's just go with like Wagner and Ronald Fisher and Ari Fisher in art and science, respectively, who contributed, you know, beauty and truth to our world.
Bloomberg.
Different, neither an artist or a scientist, but there are a lot of these, yeah.
What do we make of the contributions?
And, you know, Wagner's a little bit tough because neither you or I are, you know, opera fans or, you know, Wagner fans exactly.
But, you know, so much in evolutionary biology and statistics is built on the fundamentals that Fisher either revealed or came to understand in a new form.
and shared with the world.
And you don't want to overthrow that because the guy was personally kind of awful. - But, okay.
There is a limit, and I will point out where I think it is.
It's a little hard, you know, to defend the exact limit.
But I think the question you just asked is one, I mean, because we've surfaced it as a question, we now have to address it in a way that would have been totally intuitive to us ten years ago, is still intuitive to us, but it's becoming less obvious in the world, which is... The question being...
If you think that it's almost always valuable to know something about the personality of the creator of a work of art, do you feel the same way about knowing something about the personality of the creator of a work of science?
Is that the question?
Yeah.
Okay.
Now, what I would say is you deal with this You do not decide to elevate the quality of the work based on the personal qualities, except in that they are directly relevant.
And you do not denigrate the work because the person had defects, even though some of those defects are, you know, scandalous.
The work is the work, and I think this is a place where I treat art a little bit more like science, and you hold them a little bit farther apart and say, you know, art isn't science.
Why should we pretend that it is?
But, you know, look, let's take the Fisher example, okay?
Here's the thing.
First of all, I should tell you, you will remember, when I took my prelims as a graduate student, Uh, ran into trouble.
I nearly failed them because I didn't know some things that my elders were certain I should know.
And they were things that they weren't holding other people responsible for knowing.
So I felt badly treated, but I was not badly treated.
What I learned later was what they were telling me was, look, Brett, the stuff that you want to do requires you to be intimately familiar with these things that you don't know.
They give you a personal, they gave, as they should have given all of us, and I think to some degree they did.
But seeing that you had particular interest in an insight in a number of theoretical areas, they were holding you to the standard of, if you're going to do that, you're going to need to know this first.
Right, well, and they were careful about it.
Because the thing is, a lot of what I was doing was like, look, the people who have done the supposedly foundational work here didn't do it right.
So, it's not, you know, so it's a waste of time to follow it up.
And their point was, yeah, but these people know.
You have to check these people out because they're actually the stuff you're building on.
And because they're, you know, two generations back, you're missing them because they're not in the conversation.
So anyway, I did go back and I learned about Sulright and Haldane and Fisher.
And the thing about Fisher, Fisher became very important to me because when I was working in Panama, I was working on bats, but as you know, I was working, my sort of side hustle was a theoretical paper on why species diversity goes up as you get towards the equator.
And there was a, A side hustle.
Yeah, it was my intellectual side hustle.
But anyway, I got into a discussion.
Why am I blanking on his name?
The scientist who lived on BCI.
I'll come up with it at some point here.
But anyway, there was a very bright- Egbert Lee.
Egbert Lee was a very bright, autistic scientist who had an encyclopedic knowledge of ecology as it was understood at the time.
He lived on the island.
He also had a place in Gamboa, but he lived on the island.
And he would invite people who were also living on the island for a time to come have a drink with him in the evening.
And then you would talk to him about your interests and if he found you interesting enough to have conversations with, he would invite you back.
So anyway, I learned a lot from him about ecology that I needed to know for my side hustle project.
And one of the things that he pointed me to was Ronald Fisher's work on ecology, which didn't answer the question, but it was necessary for what I was doing.
So, I really began to appreciate Fisher as an ecologist.
Um, the whole time I knew that he had these abhorrent anti-Semitic beliefs and, you know, not only are they abhorrent, but I'm Jewish, right?
But it didn't change what he understood about, you know, the way creatures interact in the forest.
Right.
It was an additional piece of context.
What's more, it Just simply it emphasizes the fact that if you have the sense that there are good people and there are bad people and the good people are not only morally good, but they're also then destined to be intellectually tops, right?
You're just gonna be confused because the fact is all of us are mixed bags and The activists see binaries where there aren't any, and they fail to see binaries where they exist.
Where they obviously exist.
Yes.
Very well said.
So anyway, my feeling is, what do you do with a guy like Fisher, who is anti-Semitic and brilliant in multiple places in biology and mathematics?
Right?
Well, you do exactly that.
He was brilliant in multiple places in biology and mathematics, and he had major personality defects, and what's more, his biology wasn't perfect.
As I mentioned, I think in a recent conversation, may have been the private Q&A, his work, Fisher's runaway sexual selection work, I think is nonsense.
And, you know, so the fact that his other work in biology is so important to me doesn't make that work better than it was.
And that doesn't make it useless.
I mean, you and I follow it a little bit differently in terms of how we view it.
But regardless, regardless of even if you land where you do, you know, it's nonsense.
You won't doubt that it has spurred a great many conversations and useful contributions downstream of it.
No, in fact, it was useful to me figuring out, you know, this on paper, this makes sense, but there's something bugging me about it, right?
That, you know, probably dozens or a hundred hours spent thinking about why does this not sit right with me?
You know, maybe I wouldn't understand what I think I understand if I hadn't You know, had that frustrating piece of work in front of me.
So anyway, why is this even a tough question?
What do you do with somebody who's not perfect?
File them with the rest of the not perfect people and, you know, you know, scorn them for their defects for which they are responsible.
And tear down the statues?
Or not, leave the statues.
Well, you leave the plinth.
I think you have to first destroy all the elk, is what I learned from... I was just gonna say, first you go after the racist elk, and then you go from there.
But, I mean, I think... I guess I'd like...
I haven't yet heard an answer to, do you treat artists and scientists differently in this regard?
Is there a sufficient difference?
So then the subtext of the question is how I'll rephrase it, which is cheating a little bit because I'm sort of providing what I think is The reason that you might say, yes, it's different.
Are there sufficient differences in what art is understood to be from what science is understood to be?
Such that, yes, it does make sense.
It is coherent and not hypocritical to have in a single worldview that, for instance, you might say, actually, for an artist, I want to know something about who that person is in order to help me assess the art.
But for a scientist, it doesn't Yeah, I think the reason to separate these things formally is that science, in order, if we regard something as true, if we are correct in regarding something scientific as true, it by definition has to stand on its own merits, irrespective of where it came from.
Or how it emerged.
Even, you know, if a computer, mind you, they're not up to it.
But if a computer was capable of generating an insight that was then borne out by empirical tests, then the point is, well, what do we do with the fact that it was a, you know, a mindless computer?
And the answer is, it doesn't matter.
What it found is true.
And in fact… Whereas Michelangelo's David… As viewed by a highly intelligent conscious life form from another planet, would presumably not be beautiful.
There might be an ability to assess the skill, but the human form that is reflected there has a beauty that is going to be intrinsic to the human aesthetic.
Well, that's true.
But what I thought you were going to say was that computers are now perfectly capable at doing something like looking at hundreds of thousands of faces and making up new faces that are perfectly plausible that don't exist.
Right?
So, it's basically a big data version of creativity.
You know, an artist who could create the face of a character and have it be perfectly realistic without that person ever having existed.
That's somebody who has terrific skill.
A computer can do it through brute force calculation.
And so, um, it, you know, it is not beautiful in that sense.
It is, it is just extrapolating.
Um, whereas, so I guess the point is a computer, you know, you could also obviously teach a computer to generate statues using, uh, CNC machines and those statues might
Beautifully, in some sense, render the human form, but that's not art in the same way that Michelangelo's David is art, because it took, you know, to render something like flesh in stone takes tremendous insight about both flesh and stone at the very least.
So I wasn't sure why you were talking about computers.
It seems irrelevant to the conversation we're having, but just then, I feel like what you arrived at, potentially, the conclusion that could emerge from what you just arrived at is computers will be able to do successful science before computers can make successful art.
That art, by its I was going to say something, but it's kind of, I don't know.
Art has more of the humanity in it that it cannot be separated from it.
And science, while deeply creative, while the hypothesis generation and the understanding, the predictions that follow and the experimental design and the interpretation of the results, all of these are better done by humans still.
But because it is more of a process, at least once you have the hypothesis, it is potentially better, more capably done by a computer than art might be.
Well, I feel like this is the conclusion that was opened up by your going off on computers there.
Ish.
I would argue that in order to be art, it has to not be done by a computer.
Now, maybe if they're eventually sentient computers, that would be different.
But doing this through brute force calculation is specifically invalidating the artistic capacity.
But I will point out that there are some uncomfortable Places in science that we already see this I can name two and probably given time I could come up with some more But one is the protein folding issue in which a computer has recently Basically Outstripped human capacity to predict functionality from fold approximately that was a so the this here is
We, humans, have understood enough about a situation and see that there are so many variations possible that we are better off outsourcing the check all the possibilities to a computer?
Is that what the biz is here?
No, the computer, it's a little more interesting than that, right?
The computer actually successfully inferred I don't want to say more than I understand here.
I haven't looked at it recently and this isn't my field in the first place, but figuring out how to fold something so that it does a particular job or how to infer the job that it does by how it's, you know, the sequence from, how will it fold from the sequence that you, the linear sequence that you've written, et cetera.
That's a very difficult set of puzzles.
And anyway, some AI system has recently demonstrated superior capacity here.
So it's more complicated than, for instance, what the heuristics do when running through many but not all of the possibilities of the possible phylogenetic trees in systematic analysis.
Well, I was going to go to an adjacent area here where, for the sake of our audience, it used to be, so in order to figure out what If you want to understand how evolution works, you need a tree that describes how creatures are related to each other so that you can see when it is that selection has built something more than once, and when it is that it has simply propagated something that it created once through a series of descendant lineages.
So you need that phylogenetic tree.
How you get the tree Involves looking at creatures figuring out what characteristics they have and then asking what is the tree on which the number of Events that is the creation of something new or the deletion of something that already existed what is the minimum number of those that you can make by rearranging the tree and Basically that implies that trees reality in terms of closeness of relationships
This wants more explanation, but you've got taxa, you've got characters that those taxa have.
How do you imagine the taxa related to one another, which requires the fewest number of evolutionary transitions to have gotten there?
Right, the fewest number of things to have happened, which then, Occam's razor-wise, implies it is the most parsimonious explanation.
But here's where this gets interesting and relevant.
It used to be.
The people that we knew in this had come from an era in which this was done by brilliant morphologists who Very carefully looked at specimens at a very fine level of detail in order to figure out what their characteristics were.
And this involved an incredible kind of understanding because they would have to figure out when, you know, the The joke was they're looking at a bump on a bone, right?
When are two bumps on two bones in two different species the same bump?
And when are they different?
And sometimes you have to go into the embryology in order to figure out whether or not it emerges from the same tissue.
And bones are easy compared to soft tissue.
Right.
So, the point is there were all of these brilliant morphologists doing the work of figuring out what the characteristics were that allowed you to make these trees.
Then what happens?
The discovery of genetic sequences.
Now you've got this interesting phenomenon where all of these people who learned this brilliant mechanism for sorting characteristics are being overwhelmed by increasingly the fact that you can just put some tissue into a process that gets the DNA sequenced and you have more data.
It's low quality because there are only four letters and so you can very easily get The same letter in the same spot from two different events, but the amount of data is so large that it overwhelms all of the noise.
And so, you've got all these people who learned how to do this in this very, very difficult way that caused them to be intimately familiar with their study organisms being replaced by a bunch of people who might not recognize their organism if they encounter it in the wild, right?
Because all they're looking at is tissue and genes.
And the point is, there's really no arguing with the fact that ultimately the amount of data in the genomes is going to overwhelm the morphology and if you sequence all this stuff, ultimately it's going to give you really, really good trees if you do the
Job of figuring out how to interpret the data correctly but it's mindless so it isn't exactly a computer doing it but it might as well be it's machines doing what people used to do looking through microscopes and and the point is yeah it's.
Scientifically, very, very useful because it generates trees that are better and it generates them faster and it generates them for taxa that maybe nobody knows anything about.
You can certainly employ it in places that you can't do a morphological or behavioral data set.
Right, but the point is I'm going to offend a lot of people.
You're already, you're right there.
I was thinking, okay.
Already we have occasionally gone after the ecologists, but now the systematists too?
Well, I'm not going after them, but the point is it's not, you know, I'm not saying that, look, there is admirable work.
But the once admirable work of knowing the organisms really, really well, that you could look at their structure, you could look at their embryology, and you could deduce important things about what had happened in a long lost evolutionary story, right?
That work has been replaced by something uninteresting.
Emergence being real, but leaving vague exactly to what degree it manifests and what that means.
Really, what you want to see is morphologists still doing what morphologists do, and developmental biologists still doing what they do, and to some degree, behaviorists as well, along with the molecular people, and then comparing the results, comparing the trees that are generated by the molecular set to the behavioral data set, to the morphological data set, to the developmental data set, and seeing whether they're conciliate and whether they're not.
The verin is going to be an interesting story.
Yes, except that, of course, the way science is funded, people are going to look at this and they're going to say, well, you know, I could throw X amount of dollars at some machinery and we could get a huge amount of data out of it.
Or I could send you on little trips to far flung corners of the world to capture rare creatures.
Where you might learn things that you didn't plan to learn, and then where's the grant money for us in that?
Right, exactly.
And so, you can see that what ought to happen as a result of this huge influx of information, of phylogenetic information, is that we ought to have a flurry of insight, and instead we're going to get mind-numbing bureaucracy and machines humming, and the biologists won't know anything about creatures.
Pretty much.
Wow, I did not see us getting there.
We are again working without Annette because once again she has not shown up to work.
She's in a box somewhere, I'm sure.
That sounds bad.
I'm sure we packed her.
We didn't leave her behind.
Well, that's true.
Yeah.
Okay.
I mean, none of that was planned.
Nope.
There's a number of things we could talk about.
There's two things that I definitely want to say a little bit about.
Oh, and then we have the Discord question.
There's like three things here.
All right.
Let's start, Zachary.
Let's start.
We're going to go pretty briefly through these next three items.
Before you show, I wondered what happened with the major players in various industries and social media this week.
Where and I was on Twitter, which is always a mistake.
And I see this tweet, which so I can't see what you can see at the moment.
And because many of you aren't seeing anything, I'm going to speak as if I can see the screen.
And I'm also going to explain what I can't see to the people who can't see either.
So CNN tweeted, breaking news.
Are they even in the news business?
Did an intern, like, wow.
Okay, what is it?
Like, what happened?
What happened?
Well, it turns out that there was just like a flurry of major institutions at a moment, boy, I forgot to put down here exactly a couple days ago, where they just put out, and that was actually the only two-word one, Version I saw, like a one word description of what they see themselves as being about or doing.
Okay.
So CNN, breaking news.
Next one.
Washington Post, news.
Okay.
NPR, radio.
POTUS, President Biden.
Democracy.
Oh.
Pfizer, science.
Whoa.
Wait a minute, one more.
McDonald's.
Clown.
I think you reversed the last two.
Exactly.
I thought you put them in the order.
I did.
Oh my god.
So I don't know how many of these there were.
I saw CNN breaking news.
What?
What happened?
And then someone else posted, I think it was the POTUS, Democracy.
I was like, wait a minute, something is happening.
So I just went like, okay, other news organizations, NPR, and These are the ones that I came up with, so there's probably a whole bunch more.
But given these, again, CNN, breaking news.
WAPA, Washington Post, news.
NPR, radio.
POTUS, democracy, this week.
Pfizer, science.
McDonald's, clown.
And McDonald's is the only one of these that has pinned that as its tweet, too.
Oh, that's beautiful.
So, I mean, I don't talk.
I don't even have any commentary here, but this just really pleased me.
I wanted to get in on this.
I feel like... What would it have been?
What would your word have been?
Dark horse.
Oh, okay.
It's two words.
No, we spell it as one word.
In the podcast, it's one word, but the concept, what does dark horse, one word, do?
Dark horse.
Dark horse, okay.
Okay.
Well, I mean, you know, this is an opportunity just to see the myopia and the skullduggery, just it's like concentrated in a single term.
Biden, democracy, really?
And it wasn't like I thought, I think someone had Tweeted or quote tweeted that one, and I went looking, figuring it was the White House.
Like, no, it wasn't the White House.
It was POTUS.
It was Biden's account, POTUS' account, that tweeted democracy.
Yeah, that's especially in light of this remarkable speech in Philadelphia this week.
It's stunning.
I think it was that day, actually.
I think it was the day of the speech that all of these happened.
Really?
Yeah.
And then, I mean, so Pfizer.
Science.
Really, guys?
You sure about that?
Also, I feel like I thought We'd already established, I thought we already knew that Fauci was science.
Wasn't Fauci science?
Could they both be science?
Well, we don't know.
I'm not sure.
How many people can be science?
No, I think you don't see.
We don't know.
He's apparently not retiring.
Wait, I thought he was.
No, no, he's leaving his post.
Oh, God.
Right, exactly.
So maybe he's headed for Pfizer and maybe they've acquired science.
So they can both wear the crown.
They can just like, he can, or hold the scepter, whatever it is that you do if you're master of science.
Master of science.
Yes, exactly.
No, he's the master of disease.
Anyway, yes.
Should we talk a little bit about this speech in Philadelphia?
If you like.
I think there's some things that I want on the record.
I don't have much.
I read a transcript, didn't watch it.
I don't like, you know, Obama was an amazing orator.
Yep.
And I didn't end up loving what he did with the country, but I always loved to watch him speak.
The last two presidents have been very hard to watch.
Yeah, very difficult.
Very difficult.
So I did not watch the speech, but I read a transcript.
But that's about all I know about it.
I've seen the visuals.
Well, I read a transcript.
I watched clips from the speech.
I haven't watched it all the way through.
But I have a distinct impression, and I don't think it depends on having seen the whole thing all the way through.
It was, A, there was a kind of brilliance to it.
A diabolical brilliance, but brilliance.
And the idea was that this was a speech that you could read two ways.
There's a very benign interpretation of the speech and of the setting, right?
You could say, well, that's unfortunate lighting.
But if you zoomed out, it was blue and red, and it was only the zoomed in that had it Looking all fiery and bloodied.
Right, exactly.
I don't think that was an accident.
I don't think it could possibly have been an accident.
For one thing, these people are masters of stagecraft, and the fact is, a president has a given size.
So, the degree to which the cameras will zoom in in order to make him appropriate sized as the speech is viewed... And recognizable.
Right, is well understood.
So, everything from the Marines behind him to the isolation in the red screen, the red background, that was all intentional.
And then the idea that, well, if you zoomed out, there was blue there, too, and it didn't look quite as fascist and bloody and all of that.
That's their defense for it, right?
And what's more, I found The, you know, this image that comes from V for Vendetta, which looks like they are intentionally trying to evoke it.
I believe they are right down to the window with the cross in it, which is much higher in the shot with Biden than it is in the movie.
But nonetheless, It looks to me like this is an intentional juxtaposition.
I'm not saying that window wasn't there, but I'm saying that they found a location, they came up with a justification for the location, they created the lighting, they wanted to evoke that.
And this leads me to an interpretation I haven't heard elsewhere.
Forgive me if it's out there and I've missed it.
There's always this uncomfortable argument about fascism and the right, right?
Fascism is a defect of the extreme right and the right, not necessarily the extreme right, but the right often grumbles and protests, right?
About national socialists, but were they really socialists?
No.
So yes, it was on the right, right?
You can get into this morass, but I realized something in watching Biden.
Reading the speech, which is that there is the synchronon of fascism is this hybrid between corporate power and governmental power, right?
It is also fascism inherently about theft.
The idea is fascists target somebody and justify the liquidation of their wealth, well-being, whatever, to generate phony growth for those who are in the fascist cabal.
That sounds true to me, but I don't know.
I won't claim to be a political scientist or a historian enough.
To say that that, it feels to me that that isn't unique to fascism, that there are several political ways of being which are predicated on, we are going to alienate, we're going to make enemies of some piece of the population so as to unify the rest.
Right.
I don't disagree.
Obviously, if we are to say that fascism involves a hybrid between government and corporate power, then that obviously puts a relatively recent start date on when fascism is invented.
And my real point is, Some will have heard me talk about the idea that the West is a very powerful mechanism for generating well-being and insight and fairness, but it is a very fragile mechanism.
And the point is that when that fragile mechanism is disturbed, it defaults Into a more robust, more primitive state.
And so I believe that what fascism is, is it is tapping into a very ancient mode that pre-exists corporations and pre-exists formalized government, right?
A lineage against lineage conflict mechanism in which the stagnation of your lineage is jump-started by going after people who are too vulnerable to defend themselves.
So here's the reason that this is important in this speech.
The speech, again, can be interpreted two different ways, and one of them is very benign, right?
This is a frustrated grandpa who is in charge of the country, who is telling us, unify, right?
The people who are against unity are the problem.
Oh, that's interesting.
You just singled out a bunch of people while you were proclaiming unity, right?
What do I do with that contradiction?
But here's what I'm getting at.
I don't think there's anything really left wing about the blue team.
Nothing other than their rhetoric, right?
Even to the extent that they want to do some things that are nominally associated with progressivism.
It's an excuse, right?
It's a lost leader that is designed to continue the march of these already powerful people and their concentration of wealth and power.
But the point is, look, I do think fascism may be more likely to emerge on the right, but I don't think it inherently lives there.
And that what we are seeing is a almost overtly Fascist movement that will protest that label.
But you've got, I mean, even this week we saw documents emerge in which the executive branch was having regular meetings about who to censor online, who their partners in tech should censor online.
Right.
That is the fusion of corporate power and government power.
What's more, it is an egregious violation of our First Amendment rights.
What's more, in this speech The President uses the phrase clear and present danger.
And clear and present danger is one of these phrases.
It sounds like a linguistic flourish, right?
It sounds like good oratory, good speech making.
It is, in fact, a term that has a very serious legal consequence.
Clear and present danger is the argument that we have the right to forego First Amendment speech rights in certain circumstances, right?
So in isolating or attempting to isolate what he calls MAGA Republicans from regular Republicans, Right?
And from the rest of us.
And to make them the demons, the insurrectionists, those who do not respect democracy, right?
By doing that, and then invoking the rhetoric of clear and present danger, what he's effectively saying is, yep, First Amendment, this is not the moment for it.
This is the moment for censorship.
And we are the people who are going to do the censoring.
And why are we doing it?
We are doing it for the good of the nation.
Which is the biggest bunch of bullshit I've ever heard, right?
It is absolutely mind-boggling that these people, right?
These people who I will point out have demonized us, right?
demonized us for stuff we turned out to be right about, who invoked their right to censor behind closed doors, didn't tell us what it was, didn't tell, you know, did not allow us to see the evidence that was being used to make these rulings in private, to demonetize us, to go after our ability to earn.
These same people, right, are now brazenly in public invoking legal terminology for exempting themselves from First Amendment protections as they claim to be defending the idea that, you know, free and fair elections you know free and fair elections are important there are winners and there are losers and it is incumbent on those of us who have lost to just simply accept it when they themselves don't do that right in the last election Right?
The prior one, they were complaining about Russian collusion, and that turned out to be bullshit.
That was just a story.
So the point is you've got two sides who are now, at least if we give them the benefit of the doubt, distrustful of the quality of our elections and their integrity.
Right?
And for them to portray themselves as those who accept the results of elections and the other people are bad because they don't accept the results of election is just, you know, it's a completely selective review of history.
So, my only point is, I think we need to take very seriously the fact that not only Is there the evidence that these people have fascist inclinations?
I'm not saying they alone have fascist inclinations.
There are fascist inclinations on the other side, too.
But they are now actively playing with the symbolism, right?
That blood red background, right?
The, you know, the ranting demagogue.
What does it allude to?
It alludes to V for Vendetta, which is a movie adored by the left.
And I think the key thing, the message here is this is your fascism.
Right?
This is a fascism of the left and the people we are going to go after are your enemies.
So don't worry about the fact that we are going to suspend all kinds of rights because you're going to come out ahead.
Right?
And I think that this could not possibly be more dangerous.
Right, these people have demonstrated a complete indifference to human suffering and human, the loss of human life and to have them intentionally playing with these symbols and modes is, that's nature's way of telling you where you are in history and we damn well better listen.
Excellent.
Just one thing to add.
It's the same kind of trick, rather, as what you need privacy for if you've got nothing to hide.
What are you so worried about this for?
We're going after the people that we all know are bad.
Yep.
What do you need your rights for?
You can count on us to protect you.
Right.
And, you know, it's this dumb little trick.
It's like, well, you know, just check if you're in the category of the people that we're about to go after.
If you're not, don't worry and join us.
And it's like, no, the West is absolutely dependent on the idea that we agree on the project more than we support our team.
Right?
It depends on that.
That's it right there.
That's it.
And, you know, I have to tell you, I think the big obstacle here is that anybody who hears us or others alarmed that what we saw was fascist symbolism is going to do exactly what they have been primed to do, which is to say that speech, yes, the lighting was unfortunate.
The camera angles were, yeah, they shouldn't have had in retrospect, the Marines standing behind him.
Yeah, none of that should have happened, but right?
And then they're going to give the excuse.
There's an archaic.
There's a way still that people in government who, as you say, are masters of stagecraft, they have access to.
All of the best everything, you know, from Hollywood, from everything.
But they still want to be able to be like, Oh, gosh, you know, we're just we're just government folk like we didn't are bad.
We didn't know.
And I agree with you.
I don't think errors that large.
No, and the illusion is too direct.
We were meant to not be able to look away from the comparison between the V for Vendetta image and this speech.
And then that primes you to sound crazy to the ears of anybody who has the excuse-making mode.
And again, the speech can be read two ways, right?
The blue and red version of the speech is like, this is Grandpa, he's frustrated, right?
And then there's the zoom in and it's, oh my God, we're targeting Americans and we are invoking our right to exempt ourselves from the First Amendment.
Right?
It's two different speeches took place simultaneously there, and the problem is that those who will make excuses for this are... they've been fed the material with which to make those excuses, and it is going to make it impossible to make the case, hey, this ought to alarm everybody.
I don't care if this is your team or not.
If your team is on this kind of a trip, you need to reign them in and figure out how to get them back to reason because this is the route to a tragedy of history.
So, I don't know.
And you know, I also think, I don't know what to make of the connection between this and this dark Brandon meme.
You've not encountered it?
No.
So, I actually initially thought the dark Brandon thing was okay.
It suggested a kind of playfulness on the blue team that they were going to lean into the... I don't know what it is.
Well, you remember the let's go Brandon?
So Let's Go Brandon happened.
The right adopted Let's Go Brandon as effectively an open code phrase for fuck you Biden.
And then the left started responding with these kind of comic book And who did this?
The left.
Okay.
was sort of a like a sinister powerful force right they cartoonified him it was called dark brandon and who did this the left okay um why would the left make him sinister because in a comic book modality the fact that he is powerful and you know he's not a i've only just seen it
but the idea is that you know you don't necessarily hate every dark character in the comic book You may be rooting for a certain dark character.
I don't know, something.
So the idea is you've got this feeble, Mentally failing guy and the left is actually claiming it's sort of the equivalent of the right claiming that Trump is playing four-dimensional chess, right?
Is he really like a bumbling bombast?
No, he's playing four-dimensional chess.
You only think he's a bumbling bombast because he wants you to, right?
And this is like...
Right, and so this is, you know, is Biden really losing his marbles?
Is he, you know, you know, being heavily managed because they can't let him off script?
Maybe we can just relegate both of them to the comic books.
It's a Pink Floyd song at the Fletcher Memorial.
Home for incurable tyrants and kings.
Yeah, it's that sort of thing.
Well, anyway, all right.
Rant over.
Let's just say that to the extent that there might have been hope in the left being playful with Dark Brandon, I think that has now become a very sinister Way of presenting this new demonizing of a particular minority for the purpose of targeting them in a fascist transition.
Well, this is going to sound like a weird segue, but I miss Pink Floyd.
Yeah, that was from the Final Cut.
That was from their final album and they were they were important.
Yeah, but that's why God gave us Radiohead.
No.
No?
Really not.
Okay, so I'm just going to briefly mention this thing that I wanted to spend a considerable time on today and come back to it next week, which is that Barbara Ehrenreich has died.
I did not know that.
She was 81.
She wasn't young.
We talked about her actually a year ago.
I went back and looked.
Episode 95 of Dark Horse, which was just about exactly a year ago, We discussed Collective Consciousness, which is the episode title, and I read some from her excellent 2006 book called Dancing in the Streets, A History of Collective Joy.
And I wanted to read some from that book again today, and I'll skip it, but I will say that she was an incredible inspiration.
She's very much on the left, and her 2001 book, Nickel and Dimed, is really the book that most people who know anything about her But not much more than that, no.
And it's, you know, her account of, which stemmed from a conversation she was having with the editor of Harper's, in which she said, I wonder, you know, some journalists should go and see if they can actually make a living on minimum wage.
And I think it was Louis Lapham, the editor of Harper's said, you know, how about you?
And so she went out, and in four successive periods of time, four successive places, she tried to make a living as a, I think it was a Walmart worker, and a health aid worker, and a front of house, like, diner worker, waitress.
And maybe there was an assembly line?
I can't remember what the fourth one was at the moment.
But truly extraordinary book.
And she's also, you know, she was remarkable.
And she actually had a PhD in biology, and then became this journalist, this activist, like I said, very much on the left, definitely had some, I think, not totally investigated feelings about what, what is true in politics now carried over from sort of what was what seemed to be true about the parties, for instance, in the 80s, as you know, many of us who
You know, who came to understand the Democrats and Republicans in a different era, haven't yet updated our sense of what the parties are.
And maybe I'll just leave with a quote that I found from her in an obituary written about her on Common Dreams.
And we'll come back to this.
We'll come back to Eric Reich next week.
She said, I have never seen a conflict between journalism and activism.
As a journalist, I search for the truth, but as a moral person, I'm also obliged to do something about it.
Which, you know, there's a lot of tension there, and there's a lot of possibility for, you know, real and honourable action, but of course what we're seeing now is many people who claim to be doing the jobs of journalists actually not doing journalism at all and only doing activism, and I think she actually did both.
I think she actually managed both.
So, I have this principle, you'll probably remember, I used to put it on the board for students.
What is the relationship between one's science and one's political perspective?
Or one's ideology, let's say is probably a better term.
And my point was, it's absurd to think there is no relationship, but it has to be a one-way relationship.
Yeah.
And the point is, your ideology naturally flows from what you understand about the world.
It cannot be allowed to affect what you understand about the world.
Right?
In other words, the world, the universe, it is what it is.
It is ours to understand how it functions.
And then having understood how it functions, if you understand game theory, for example, you may embrace the precautionary principle, right?
You may be very interested in good governance because you're concerned about collective action problems, right?
These things naturally follow from your understanding, but it cannot be That your political perspective causes you to believe things about the world.
That is a completely illegitimate relationship, and I would argue that the same thing is described here.
Excellent.
Okay, so we'll come back to Aaron Reich next week.
Excellent.
And then we just, we owe our Discord people an answer to their question for this week, since we're not doing a Q&A.
They had asked, so again, if you want in on I'm getting a question asked from Discord every week.
Join one of our Patreons.
Question.
I had not previously considered the many benefits of mixed-age group play, which is outlined in your book, our book, on page 157, apparently.
There must be a similar benefit to mixed-age or grade schooling.
What subjects do you think would be better learned in this environment?
So this is a topic on which we could talk for months, years, decades.
But I will say to start us off here, and we're not going to spend too long at it, that school, as we also talk about in the school chapter of 100 Gathers Guide to the 21st Century, is not only a uniquely human phenomenon, but a very new and modern is not only a uniquely human phenomenon, but a very new And the vast majority of the learning that happens for humans is not in a school environment.
School is a place that learning can happen, and there are some things that are probably best learned in a school environment, but most things that you would want to learn that is not true for.
And so not only is that true, but the modern instantiation of school where you are segregated by age is also particularly new.
And, you know, just just because population density allows for you to accumulate, you know, 20 to 30, 20 to 40 kids of the same age in classrooms throughout a city makes it possible.
But that doesn't mean it's better.
And so, you know, the trope, the true trope, like of the one room schoolhouse, such as my father actually was raised in in Iowa.
Or went to school in Iowa in the 40s and early 50s, was, of course, more provincial.
There were fewer opportunities.
There wasn't as much stuff.
There weren't as many resources.
But what you get is older kids can learn how to teach, and by learning how to teach, you learn what you actually do and do not know.
And younger kids can aspire to be able to do what the older kids are, as opposed to feeling like, well, this is what I'm doing.
This is what people of my age are expected to do.
And the fact is that outside of a very few fundamental and mostly very early developmental processes, The order in which we learn things is not even set, and certainly the timing with which we learn things is not set.
The idea that, and I'm just going to make something up, it's been a long time since our kids were young enough for this to be relevant.
If you're in second grade, it must be time for multiplication.
Why?
Maybe you were ready for multiplication when you were four, and maybe you're not ready for it now because of something that happened developmentally, and it's going to be a couple more years.
Instead of feeling like, therefore you're dumb, Actually, let it happen when it's relevant, and that's an easier thing to accomplish in a mixed-age classroom.
All right, I would add something.
I think Part of the problem is that for economic reasons, we built classrooms that stratify kids by age and place teachers at the center.
And the problem is that this is not how we are built to learn at all.
It is economically efficient, but it is not intellectually efficient.
And it also creates a danger of Some kind of, some permutation on reversion to the mean.
Where if you are grouped with kids who are your age, well what is the range of capacities in kids your age?
It's narrower than the range of capacities in kids in general.
Narrower in both directions.
And so a kid who's truly extraordinary doesn't have any models nearby or peers who are capable of, you know, volleying with them because they're in a room that's been stratified for people who are near them in In capacity for the purpose of putting them in range of the teacher.
Not near them in capacity.
Near them in age, but not necessarily capacity.
Well, but nearer to them, they will be nearer to them in age because they'll be at the same, you know, let's say that you're a math prodigy, right?
And the point is maybe you're one of these kids who could be through, you know, calculus in the sixth grade, but there's nobody around you.
You're slowing down because most of the math that's around you is, you know, whatever sixth grade math looks like.
So anyway, my point would be, probably ideal for the human mind is the equivalent of It's not going to be a great example, but let's say a tennis club in which you've got the people who are picking up a racket for the first time and you've got the person who's going to go on and play at Wimbledon or something.
And the point is wherever you are, right?
As you may be picking up the racket for the first time, but as you're going back to the locker room, you may stop and watch the pro and learn something about tennis that then as you develop your skills of just basic racket handling, Right, you've got on board some motivation from it and some insight about how the game is really played when you're advanced.
And in any case, I would say the question we've been asked is what subjects might lend themselves to this.
I guess the question is, I'm not entirely convinced that there are subjects that don't lend themselves to this.
That in effect, there is no harm that I see.
There are some things where you'd want to put a minimum age limit on, you know, if you're doing shop, if you're doing experiments, you know, science experiments with caustic chemicals, something like that.
Yeah, but even that, even that.
I'm not saying that we should organize the world this way because there are downsides, but from the point of view of how do we get people to do machine shop work that's really creative and high quality, right?
I'm not sure that the people who are just starting out getting to peer in the window of the masters of the craft, the journeymen, is bad.
I'm almost sure it's good.
No, not at all.
I'm saying that there are ages below which you don't want kids exposed to power tools.
No, no.
Well... That's all.
I don't think kindergartners should be in shop with, you know, a table saw that doesn't have a saw stop on it or something.
That's all.
I mean, it's a really obvious point.
I know you don't disagree with this.
It doesn't require any further discussion.
Well, but the thing is, in order to be good at shop, you should be doing something in kindergarten.
Of course.
And so, I guess what I would say is, it's impractical to have the journeyman near the kindergarten, but... But it's also true that in most cultures, kids have lots more access to things that are actually dangerous.
It's the hyper-novelty of the weird world, the 21st century weird world, that puts you at risk of actually killing yourself, rather than experimenting and being like, oh, okay, the three-year-olds are walking around in the dirt and stumbling near the fire and playing with knives, and that's okay because that's how you learn.
That's awesome.
But not once you add, you know, wall power and power tools.
No, I'm not arguing that.
But I am arguing, I'm sure there is a benefit to exposing those kids to what happens at the top level of the discipline.
Sure.
Not letting them be hands-on with it, but letting them see how it is done, letting them talk to people who do it so that they can understand how a mind that does this well thinks about these things, so that as they're learning the basics, they've got their eye on the right thing, right?
Just as you might, as you're picking up skiing, watch the masters on television do it and think, oh, what is that?
But watching people at a much higher level is different from being in the same classroom with them.
So, um, is, so your answer here is you, you think there's basically nothing, uh, that wouldn't be better learned in this environment.
And maybe we should, um, stop there.
There's a lot more to say here, but yeah.
Let's put it this way.
I remain to be convinced that there is a category where there isn't at least some substantial benefit from seeing, uh, people who've mastered something from the very beginnings of your, uh, interacting with.
I think, um, you know, certainly like foreign languages, absolutely.
Um, you know, there's a way in which, especially, Modern science is taught, and we used to run into this a lot when we were professors, where it is expected, it is understood, it is received wisdom that in order to end up taking, say, molecular biology or genetics or neuro, you need to have taken the introductory series first.
Because it's absolutely necessary.
I didn't do that.
As I happened to walk through literature in anthropology, I was like, oh, I want to do bio.
I don't have time for that.
I'm going to start with neuro.
That's, oh, cool.
If you're driven and you have some capacity, you can do this.
And frankly, you're more likely to get caught in one of the flaming hoops they erect for you if you have to go through all of the basically weed-out courses and not have the really exciting Like, beyond competent professors in the different courses.
But it is true that for certain things within science and math, there is a linearity.
There is a, actually, you already need to know this if you're going to do this.
And so, as will always be the case if you're trying to sort of Throw everything, everyone in this case, into a pot and say, okay, let's see how you can all learn from one another and also have the authority teaching you things that they think you need to know.
There will be glitches, because there will be things that the younger people don't know, and some of the older people also, but all of the younger people won't know something, so they just haven't had enough time on the planet yet to have been exposed to them.
So there'll be problems with that in the more explicitly sometimes linear fields like maths and sciences, unlike places like history and art and philosophy, and philosophies may be an edge case.
Yeah, I think that's right.
And I think you're right.
Probably math, your ability to glean what the experts are doing is probably pretty darn minimal.
And so the value of exposing you to it early is probably lower, maybe close to zero, you know, the real edge of the discipline versus you're just getting your feet wet with your number line.
It's not, you know, that's potentially not so valuable, but But as a general matter, yeah, you should see the full range of what's possible at every stage, and that, you know, it may not be practical, but useful where it can be applied.
All right.
Well, I think that brings us to the end of Dark Horse Livestream 140.
We'll be back next week.
Probably no Q&A next week, but we're going to leave that option open.
And we encourage you again to subscribe, like, share, follow along, all of that.
And until we see you next, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
