In this 142nd in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we discuss the state of the world through an evolutionary lens.This week, we discuss how Chile’s newly proposed, and newly rejected, Constitution. Science journals and the media want us to believe that it’s super-sciencey, but a read of the actual document suggests otherwise. We also discuss affirmative action among STEM faculty, and also, why myopia is increasing, and what can be done...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number, is it 141?
142.
It's 142.
Which was literally the last thing I said to you before we came on air.
Really?
Yeah.
Okay, here's the thing.
I do listen to you intently for all kinds of reasons and then there's moments before the podcast and things like that in which my mind is doing other things.
The buffer was full for sure.
The buffer.
Thank you for rationalizing on my behalf.
I appreciate that.
It's good stuff.
Hello, everyone.
Here we are.
Here we are.
Here we are in this makeshift setup where, for those of you just listening, we've been here before.
It's a bit kludgy.
It's going to remain a bit kludgy for a while.
We're still waiting on the fiber optic for our new studio to burrow underneath a bunch of stuff and to get to the place.
So it's going to be a few weeks of kludge.
A few weeks of Kluge before we get to the next level Kluge.
Yeah, next level Kluge.
That's what we're shooting for.
All right, so we got some business.
So today we're going to be talking about the Chilean Constitution a little bit, and affirmative action for women in STEM, and myopia.
Your opia?
I consider it all of our opia, increasingly.
I tried it.
It wasn't great.
It makes no sense at all.
It was inexpensive.
For you.
Fair point.
Okay, and here we have our epic tabby joining us.
Fairfax is here.
We got Madison snoring off screen here, Maddy.
All right, name for James, even though she's a girl.
Yes.
And okay, business.
Business.
I was going to clap.
I shoot everyone out of their seats.
No, you don't want to do that.
Okay, we follow these live streams with a Q&A.
We haven't for a couple of weeks, but we're going to do that today unless tech problems get in the way.
Please ask your questions.
You can start asking questions now.
They've been formulating their questions for weeks.
For weeks at darkhorsesubmissions.com.
We don't get to all of them, but we get to as many as we can.
This week is the one-year anniversary of the publication of A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, our New York Times best-selling book that approaches all of many of the issues of modern life with an evolutionary lens and points to the problem of hyper-novelty as causing many of our problems.
This actually will come full circle and talk about that when we talk about myopia to finish up the show.
Quite by accident, but it shows up at just the right moment for the anniversary.
Right.
But, I mean, the fact is that every week there's some story that is relevant to the question of, oh my god, what are we doing to ourselves?
How should we be living now?
And, frankly, that is precisely the set of prescriptions and ways of thinking that we Produce and propose in A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century.
So if you haven't read it, consider picking up a copy or finding it at your local library.
There are many copies at our new local library, I was pleased to discover.
Which is marvelous.
Yes, and it's also available in many other languages, including Spanish and French, and soon to be many, many others.
My computer is set to go to sleep too quickly.
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We have a store, of course, darkhorsestore.org, where we've got the shirts that we introduced last week, Keep Portland Weird, all caps, Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic, and a lot of other stuff as well.
Consider joining me on Natural Selections at naturalselections.substack.com.
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Right, right.
So they're making money on us, but we're not making money on us, at least not through YouTube.
So that's fun.
We do have Patreons.
you can join either or both of ours.
On either of them, you get access to our Discord community where honest conversations on difficult topics take place all the time.
They have karaoke night.
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There are some book clubs, lovely things that happen on the Discord community.
And right now on my Patreon, you can ask questions that we will be answering in next week's private Q&A.
We do a private Q&A for people on my Patreon on the last Sunday of every month, and Brett has some more intimate conversations on his Patreon, including one that you had just this morning.
One that we had just this morning.
It was a very active conversation.
We are talking about what it is that might be done to protect the United States and the world from the catastrophe of our upcoming midterm elections.
And in any case, that conversation is likely to make its way to a upcoming Dark Horse livestream.
We're going to discuss some of the things that we have come up with.
All right.
So anyway, it's Obviously an important moment, and the Coalition of the Reasonable is motivated.
Great.
Wonderful.
And, of course, we have sponsors.
All of our sponsors produce products or services that we actually and truly vouch for.
We have three each week at the top of the show.
You'll always know if we are reading reading material for which we are paid by the little sound before and after the ads and the green perimeter around the screen if you are watching.
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All right.
Well, because we are a bit kludgy today, I can't share my screen with you, so I'm going to apologize in advance for a few gaps in what I'm doing.
The first thing we want to talk about today is the constitution in Chile that was just put before a vote that would have been a replacement of the constitution of about 40 years that's been in place since Pinochet's time.
It was widely discussed in the media, including in Nature, as a pro-science constitution.
And so at the point that it was voted down by, I think, a 62 to 38 vote, 62% of the voting public in Chile said no to this, it would appear that Chile is anti-science, they're backwards, they're like agrarian in the 19th century, and they really aren't interested in moving forward with the times and in embracing science.
And Nature reports, for instance, that, oh boy, And I have lost my safari here to show you guys that in September 7, 2022, Nature, again one of the top two science journals in the world, in its news section has a headline, I feel lost.
That's the headline.
Chilean researchers saddened by vote to reject new constitution.
Nearly 62% of Chileans voted against the proposed charter, which would have boosted science.
That's the headline.
And when you go into the actual article, you find: The votes are in, and many scientists are disappointed.
On the 4th of September, Chileans voted to reject a proposed new constitution for their nation.
The draft charter, developed over a year by a citizen-led assembly, framed science as a tool that could improve society.
It also emphasized actions against climate change and support for research across all of Chile, rather than only institutions in the capital city.
"I feel very lost," says Andrea Vera-Gajardo, a mathematician at the University of El Praizo who volunteered as an electoral observer.
"I don't understand the choice Chile made." My gut tells me that fear won, says Barbara Rojas Ayala, an astronomer at the University of Tarapacá in Arica, apologies for the pronunciations, who endorsed the letter.
In addition to bolstering science, the proposed charter suggested drastic changes to Chile's economic and political systems that people weren't ready for, she says.
If accepted, the draft constitution would replace the current version put in place in 1980 during the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.
So further in this article, We have a slight counterpoint to the apparent embrace by all scientists in Chile.
Here we go.
Felipe Paredes, a Chilean biochemist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, was one of the millions of people who disliked the proposed document.
He agreed with some of it, such as the way it prioritized social and human rights, but he also felt things were missing.
For example, the draft did not include any mention of funding for science.
I needed a clear signal that there was going to be more investment.
I did not see that, Paredes says.
Oh, and he proceeds, he also wanted to see explicit protection of patents and industrial property rights, which is included in the current Constitution.
So there's at least a little bit of indication here in this Nature article that maybe this is not exactly as it is being described.
And when you click through on that article, you find another one from Nature from July 28, 2022 of this year, in which they say, Chile proposes new constitutions steeped in science.
Although many researchers support the draft, opposition can sink it.
So, for two articles here, Nature is saying, this Constitution is about science.
Basically, Fauci-esque, if you're opposed to this Constitution, you're opposed to science.
If you don't like this Constitution, you're saying that you don't like science.
A vote against this Constitution is a vote against science.
I am making up these particular things, but that is clearly the message that we are being sent by Nature, again, one of the top two science journals in the world.
And this piece begins... actually let me go in to the one that I have highlighted.
Interesting.
This piece begins, Chile has a new bestseller.
Since it was finalized on the 4th of July, interesting, a draft of what could become the nation's constitution has commanded massive numbers of online downloads and crowds waiting to buy paperback copies.
It may become one of the most read texts in Chile in recent times, says Ximena Baez, president of the country's National Association of Postgraduate Researchers, who is based in Val Paiso.
So, again, this piece published in Nature indicates how totally different it is from the standing constitution, which was put in place in 1980.
and And while it doesn't really point to anything in particular, it does keep saying it's all about science, science, science, science.
So I had to work a little bit to find it.
I found it.
It's, of course, in Spanish.
I had it translated.
Again, I was hoping to show you some of the translation, but I'm going to walk us through a little bit of what is in here.
First of all, it's really long, and it really doesn't seem like any of the media, including, frankly, the Nature articles, but, you know, this has been covered by CNN, MSNBC, it's been covered all over the place.
It doesn't really seem like anyone has actually read it, which is Not that uncommon, but it is a bit of a problem if they're going to continue to repeat the talking points of, this is about science, this is a science constitution.
It's not uncommon at all, but it is completely unforgivable.
Journalistically speaking, the idea that they are going to report on it without having read it is appalling and opens the door to all kinds of skullduggery where, you know, the label on the box doesn't match the contents.
That's right, and I will say that the actual text of the Constitution is 388 articles, many of which have many sub points, and I did not read the entire thing.
I read in detail the first 70 of them, and then I searched on the document For all occurrences of the word science, scientists, scientific, and also climate, because climate seems to be the thing that is most what people are talking about when they say that this is a science-heavy, pro-science piece.
So, I'm just going to walk us through a few of the things that I find in the first fifth of the articles, and then point out what happens in every single instance of when some form of the word science shows up in the translated version of the proposed Constitution, which again has been voted down.
Article 6.
Let's see, I was hoping to show you guys.
Let me find it.
Article 6.
I've got to find it.
Apologies, guys.
Come on.
Wow, this is going slowly.
Just scrolling, scrolling, scrolling.
I'm not sure what's going on.
Article 6, which is pretty high up in this piece.
The state promotes a society in which women, men, sexual and gender diversity, and dissidents participate in conditions of substantive equality.
Recognizing their effective representation as a principle and a minimum condition for the full and substantive exercise of democracy and citizenship.
Well, right away, we have the use of some very modern political language that doesn't actually have any basis in science.
There's nothing exactly anti-scientific there yet, and I did go back and forth when the translation was a little weird and looked at the original.
And this is clearly a reference to gender identity and to a conflation of gender identity with sex.
And we will see later on some of the demonstrations of that.
Right away, I'm unconvinced that this is actually all that focused on what we understand to be true scientifically.
And the second point in Article 6 of, again, the newly proposed but voted down Chilean constitution, is all state collegiate bodies, autonomous constitutional bodies, senior and executive bodies of the administration, as well as the boards of directors of public and semi-public enterprises, must have a parity composition that ensures that at least 50% of their members are women.
Now that has nothing to do with science, but it is rather a remarkable and heavy-handed attempt to fix a problem that many actually don't even see as particularly a problem at this point.
It may or may not be a problem, but what is definitely a problem is the idea that you can simply impose an arbitrary
Well, let's talk about that though, because when you say arbitrary, some people will immediately say, well, but it's the sex ratio, it's a one-to-one sex ratio, therefore we need 50%, well they say at least 50% of their members being women, but it's arbitrary because Well, it's arbitrary for a number of different reasons.
One, you don't know how much interest there is in joining these things.
Two, you don't know that the sex ratio is 50-50 at adulthood, and so if you were going to try to write this carefully, what you would say was that it was at parity with The population, right?
You would not assign a number to it.
Well, I think that's a weak argument.
The sex ratio tends to skew more towards women as a population ages because men tend to die younger for a number of reasons.
Partially because people were holding their beers.
And the men were allowed to go do ridiculous things that may or may not have worked on what could go wrong.
But I really think that that's quite a trivial point, that sex ratio is more or less one-to-one.
And what the real issue here is, is that as I have written about extensively, and as we wrote about in The Hunter-Gatherer's Guide, and as I have talked about in various places,
Time and again what we find is when you strip away barriers to access, barriers to choice, such that women are, as girls, are as free as possible to choose to go into things like STEM, like science, technology, engineering, and math, The freer the girls and women are, the less likely they are to choose those things.
That you find, not that no women choose those things, of course they do, and of course the best engineer in the world at any given point in time might be a woman, and you should expect there will be some women in those fields.
But the idea that you should expect that the number of women interested in, say, civil engineering, will be equal to the number of men interested in civil engineering, Well, and even worse is the fact that if you take any category and you assign it a percentage of the target group, right?
You are automatically reducing the overall capacity of the thing.
And the problem is there's a booby trap here, right?
If you say, well, if you're going to say 50% of the whatever it is must be women, that you will reduce the quality that you are implying that women are of lower quality than men.
No.
The same thing would be true if you said 50% at least must be men, or 50% at least must be white people, or 50% at least must be any group.
The point is, what you want to do, if you want to increase the capacity of the committee or the school or whatever it is, is Basically establish a merit-based system in which you pick the most qualified people.
Yes, that can be a problem if there is differential access to the things that make you highly qualified, but the point is so-called equity is intention.
It is in tension with the capacity of the resulting Graduates are the resulting capacity of whatever entity you're trying to make equitable, right?
So in writing a constitution this way, they are deciding to prioritize one thing over another, which is capability.
And so it is not obvious that scientifically speaking one would make that choice.
There's at least a discussion that has to be had about which is the highest value.
Do you want the capacity of the thing to be highest by taking whoever is best and putting them on The entity or do you want the degree to which it achieves parity?
Do you want to prioritize that?
Exactly.
So there are a couple more.
I'm just going to ask if our producer, who is letting a cat in at the moment, can maybe get us some water while he's up.
Thank you.
There's some good stuff in here, so we're gonna hit some of the low points for sure, and I think the one that I just read is one of the low points.
But Article 8, for instance, in translation says, "...individuals and peoples are interdependent with nature and form an inseparable whole with it.
The state recognizes and promotes good living as a relationship of harmonious balance between people, nature, and the organization of society." They also say, let's see, Article 14, Chile's international relations, as an expression of its sovereignty, are based on respect for international law and the principles of self-determination of peoples, non-intervention in matters within the domestic jurisdiction of states, multilateralism, solidarity, cooperation, political autonomy, and legal equality among states.
Skipping forward a little bit within Article 14, Chile declares Latin America and the Caribbean as a priority area in its international relations.
It is committed to maintaining the region as a zone of peace and freedom from violence.
It promotes regional, political, social, cultural, economic, and productive integration among states, and facilitates cross-border contact and cooperation among Indigenous peoples.
This makes a lot of sense for a South American country.
I have to say that I'm troubled by something here, and it isn't the content of those concepts.
It is what they are doing in a constitution.
Now I can't say... It's a very long document.
I understand that, but maybe the purpose of the very long document is to hide something with teeth in a lot of stuff that has no teeth that sounds right to certain ears, right?
The whole idea that nature A publication which has increasingly... This isn't nature.
I understand that.
But the whole idea that nature is arguing that this is a pro-science constitution and that it's tragic that the population of Chile has rejected it is absurd coming from nature.
Right, which has recently taken up arms against real science in favor of virtue signaling.
And my point would be, maybe the whole reason that whatever team it is that is portraying itself as the team of science, while in fact undermining science, it wants something out of this document.
And the question is, well, you know, it's a needle in a haystack.
Where is the thing with teeth that it really wants?
Okay, there's a lot of needles and haystacks here.
I don't think that's the one.
I think that that struck me as a well-written, like, okay, we're actually going to acknowledge that we care more about the region that we are in than we do care about things on the opposite side of the world.
So let's move on.
Article 26.2, somewhere in here.
You know, they've got stuff.
It's anti-death penalty.
No person shall be subjected to enforced disappearance.
That seems like directly responsive to Pinochet.
That was in Article 22.
That was in Article 22.
Article 26, Section 2.
The state has the priority duty to promote, respect, and guarantee the rights of children and adolescents, safeguarding their best interests, their progressive community, their comprehensive development, and their right to be heard and to participate in and influence all matters affecting them. - Yeah.
Great, but the priority duty to promote, respect, and guarantee the rights of children and adolescents, including their comprehensive development, seems a little bit out of whack with what we are soon going to see is a lot of language basically denying the biological reality of sex.
Specifically, Article 30.3, again in the voted-down proposed new constitution for Chile, Article 30.3 The translation reads as follows.
Women and pregnant women and pregnant women have the right, before, during and after childbirth, to have access to the health services they require, to breastfeed and to maintain a direct and permanent link with their daughter or son, taking into consideration the best interests of children and adolescents.
Well, that's strange, right?
Women and pregnant women and pregnant women.
But when you go to the original, which Their nonsense language through the translation algorithm?
Exactly.
Because it couldn't figure out what the hell was being said?
Yes.
That's beautiful actually.
Las mujeres y personas gestantes tienen derecho.
So women and pregnant people have rights, is what it says in the Spanish.
And pregnant people isn't a thing, right?
It's pregnant women.
And really all they have to say is women or pregnant women.
But what they say is women and pregnant people.
And you could argue that of course they mean women, but actually of course they don't.
What they mean is it's women who declared themselves men but have decided to get pregnant anyway.
And that actually fully reveals that they are women and that they aren't Men.
And that, in a piece that is being touted by the mainstream media and the major science journals on the planet, in a document that is supposedly all about science, tells us that we are in a political landscape that is so full of landmines that it's going to be hard to find the science to get us out, frankly.
Yeah, let's put it this way.
I would say any failure to write clearly with respect to something as fundamental as this is an indication that what you are dealing with is at best highly compromised in a scientific regard, if not null and void.
In other words, It's one thing to say this constitution should or should not have been passed, but to tout it as a pro-science constitution, if it's really about this new anti-scientific vogue, is insane.
And not surprising.
Yes.
Not surprising at this moment.
And not surprising that a journal that should be Saying this has been touted as a pro-science constitution, but within it there are many things that actually fly in the face of what science has correctly revealed about the universe, that it is showing up on the opposite side and basically pretending that Chileans have embraced primitivism and rejected science.
It's the height of irony.
That's right.
You know, we've got stuff about Indigenous Peoples being allowed to keep and grow their own seeds into perpetuity.
That's awesome.
We've got protections for seasonal workers.
We've got the right to collective bargaining.
There's some good stuff in here.
There's some eminent domain things that I'm not sure about.
State guarantees.
This is in Article 51 The state guarantees the availability of the land necessary for the provision of decent adequate housing.
It administers an integrated public land system with powers to prioritize the use, management, and disposal of public land for purposes of social interest and the acquisition of private land in accordance with the law.
Yeah, this is one of these things that a functioning society absolutely needs these rights, but a pathological society is guaranteed to abuse them.
And so it's really hard to know how to write a constitution such that you protect the people's right to basically buy land that is necessary for It's necessary to acquire for the public good while protecting the rights of people to own land and not have that power, you know, used against them punitively or on behalf of, you know, corporate profit or something like that.
So yes, it's hard to know.
It's one of the genuinely difficult issues in writing such a document.
That's right.
Article 61.2.
The state, this makes me particularly upset because it conflates, well, you'll see.
The state guarantees its exercise without discrimination.
So the translation is weird here, but I don't think it gets in the way of what is intended, but it's not quite right.
The state guarantees its exercise without discrimination, with a gender perspective, inclusion, and cultural relevance, as well as access to information, education, health, and the services and benefits required for it, ensuring all women and persons with the capacity to bear children, the conditions for a pregnancy, a voluntary interruption of pregnancy, a voluntary and protected childbirth and maternity.
So you've got gender ideology with women and persons with the capacity to bear children.
That's women who have the capacity to bear children, because men don't.
Not all women have the capacity to bear children, but only women have the capacity to bear children.
So there's that little bit of nonsensical, non-scientific, anti-scientific garbage in there.
But then they've got reproductive rights, and they're basically putting into the Constitution the right to abortion.
They don't use the word in the original either.
So they're being a little squidgy about it without using the word, and I'm sure that that was part of the objection among some voters, but I really wish that reproductive rights, about which we Disagree with many on the right would stop being conflated with the idea that men could get pregnant.
It makes the left look like they are entirely, like we are entirely, completely out to lunch.
Utter lunatics.
I wouldn't mind going out to lunch, but back on the topic at hand.
I want to try to put this in context, because it is not a minor issue that this document, in the middle of trying to define a right, is going to kowtow to a momentary anti-scientific fashion.
It is like, imagine that you go to the evolution conference.
And let's say that, I don't know, there's an important lecture and paper being presented on the evolution of bats.
I'm going to choose bats simply because I know something about their evolution.
But imagine that the person presenting this work was to say, you know, when the chiroptera emerges into the fossil record, 50 million years ago, praise be to the Lord, it was essentially fully formed, right?
Now this is true.
The fossils that show up 50 million years ago of bats were fully formed, implying that there's a process of evolution that was not captured by the fossil record.
We can talk about why.
But to the extent that the talk on the fossil record And the evolution of bats includes an allusion to a creator for those who may think that that's important.
Invalidates the talk, right?
It suggests that this is not a scientific exercise, that this is an exercise in something social.
And while it may be important to have gratitude to some mythical creator for some purpose, it doesn't belong in a scientific conference.
And this confusion over who can give birth and how we protect their rights.
It's like, we must protect the rights of women who we're now confused about.
And it's like, well, I don't really accept that you're going to be good at protecting them.
What you've written here is compromised in its ability to protect them because you have sabotaged the definition for some purpose that has to do with, you know, I don't know, Rubbing shoulders with people at the cocktail party that you like, right?
That doesn't belong in a constitution.
And, you know, again I would say...
There are certain documents.
If you were buying a house, for example, and you were reading in your loan document, and there was a certain political statement just interspersed with the provisions of how the thing worked, it's like, okay, now I'm walking away from this loan document.
I don't know why that's in there, but the fact is I know that its being in there is alarming.
Yep.
Right?
And I'm out.
I'm going to look for another lender.
Right?
So, you know, somehow the people of Chile seem to have spotted a compromised document and rejected it in spite apparently strong pressure to embrace it as the modern scientific thing to do and, you know, good on them for noticing.
Right.
Absolutely.
More.
Every person has the right to the free development and full recognition of his or her identity in all its dimensions and manifestations, including sexual characteristics, gender identities and expressions, name and sex affective orientations.
Which sounds awesome, except when combined exactly with what you're saying with the other things in here.
But they've got Death with Dignity.
Article 68.
Okay, they've got the Constitution ensures the right of people to make free and informed decisions about their care and treatment at the end of life.
Great.
Article 69.
Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and freedom of movement to reside, stay, and travel anywhere in the national territory, as well as to enter and leave it.
The law shall regulate the exercise of this right.
What?
That's the article in its entirety, and I went and looked and I thought, I feel like Chile had lockdowns.
I feel like Chile restricted movement, and so it did.
So a BBC article from June of 2021, and I fact-checked this against some others, Santiago, capital city, imposed stay-at-home orders in response to rising COVID cases.
I think Santiago is the capital, must be, yeah.
So a little over a year ago, Santiago imposed stay-at-home orders in response to rising COVID cases.
And the article was funny, because it was just shocked, because despite really high rates of vaccination, COVID was climbing, and they still were going to need to lock everyone down.
Stay-at-home orders, okay?
So I don't actually know If this article in the Constitution, Article 69, which says your freedom of movement shall not be restricted except unless we're going to restrict it, basically, is maybe just saying we're going to still be able to do that to you, or if it's actually a response to that and they're saying, yeah, we're not going to do that anymore.
I can't.
There's no way for me to tell because I wasn't in on this.
But did I say also that this was a citizen-created document, which is all the rage in some circles now, but this wasn't created by people who were elected?
Well, let me point out, citizen created document means what exactly?
How do you prevent somebody who is representing some other interest from participating in citizen creation?
Well, I think it stands in for, oh boy, this is likely to have been a process that is not what it seems.
Right, and the provision that you just read in which the right to freely move about is nominally protected in the same sentence That's the next sentence.
Yes, in the same article stanza, let's say.
Okay.
In the same stanza as the mechanism by which that right will be circumvented, is again, it is a signal that somebody is interested in pretending one thing, signaling one direction and going the other direction.
No, this struck me, you know, this is not about science, right, but this one, Article 69 here, struck me as the perfect synopsis of the problem overall with this document.
Like, okay, your words sound great, and in this case they sound really good even if you look closely, but you're going to undermine them right away in this case, such that your words actually mean nothing.
Everyone has the right to freedom of movement.
The law shall regulate the exercise of this right.
Do you or do you not have freedom of movement?
Well, when we say you do, you do.
And this is very similar to Biden's Philadelphia speech in which it could be read as a patriotic embrace of our founding rights.
Right.
Except where it comes to maggot Republicans.
Right.
I mean, you know, Why would we agree that MAGA Republicans have those rights?
Not those people.
You know, clear and present danger.
They're a clear and present danger.
And so, you know, speech rights are all well and good, but, you know, can't take them too far.
You know, so, yeah.
Let's put it this way.
I think the way, especially in light of something like a constitution, which exists above the level of standard law, One ought to have an alarm bell standard, right?
If your alarm bells are going off, especially in multiple places in the document, it's null and void.
It doesn't matter how much good stuff is in there, right?
It's null and void because somebody who constructed it either was unclear on how to protect rights or wasn't really interested in doing it.
Right.
And that's part of why I bring up the idea that it was citizen created.
Why would you try to frame a constitution with that as the method by which you do it?
You want citizen input, but that's what the voting is about.
Well, there's a question about how to do this, and this is an issue that's arising in the U.S.
as well.
I have long said that we are in need of a constitutional convention because our founding documents have the right idea, but they're not up to the modern challenges.
However, there's no way we can afford a constitutional convention.
It will be a disaster if it happens.
And so, you know, it isn't clear how you get In modern times it's not clear how you get to that process without corruption or insanity taking it over.
I think it's a question we need to answer because these increasingly antiquated documents, or in the case of Chile, documents compromised by the era of their founding, they're not up to the challenge of modern times.
Okay, so about at this point in reading this, I knew I was going to run out of time, and so I did this search on all instances of forms of the word science, and found not very many cases.
Three instances of the word science or sciences, seven of the word scientific, and then a few of the word climate.
Many of them are in Article 98, which my translation here somehow garbled the numbers.
I don't know why the numbers wouldn't have shown up well, but so let me just make sure I'm reading the right one here.
Yeah, here we go.
Article 98.
Sciences and technologies, their applications and research processes must be developed according to the bioethical principles of solidarity, cooperation, responsibility, and with full respect for human dignity, animal sentience, the rights of nature, and the other rights established in this Constitution and in international human rights treaties ratified and enforced in Chile.
Animal sentience.
This strikes me as, you know, maybe the, maybe Article 98 is the main thing that nature and the other, you know, that they saw and went like, oh it's a pro-science, it's science forward, it's, this document is all about science.
But this broad sweeping statement with a bunch of terms that are ill-defined And, let's see, in the original, yeah, Principios Bioethicos.
I don't know what a bioethical principle of solidarity is.
Solidarity with flatworms on the basis of their sentience, which is well understood in certain circles, I guess.
Well, corals too, but not mushrooms.
Not, yeah, exactly.
Animal sentience only.
Screw the mushrooms.
Speaking of lunch, you know.
Are we vegan now?
I think mushrooms are... I guess they're... Well, you're just like... If speaking of lunch means mushrooms, I don't like... When I think of lunch, I often think of a ham sandwich.
That's because you are not in solidarity with the sentience of the biota.
I picked ham.
I just said that.
Like, you know, that's a sentient animal.
Yes.
That actually, we should all consider this is part of the value of understanding what you're eating and not just having it come cellophane-wrapped from the store and having no relationship with it at all.
Pigs are incredibly smart.
Yes.
And flatworms aren't.
None that I've talked to have impressed me.
Is that what you're doing late at night?
Yes, over the internet for the most part.
Yeah, on the internet, nobody knows you're a flatworm.
You're a flatworm, indeed.
There's so much signaling in here, and I mean, I guess what it really says Even if this document is completely organic, the product of well-intentioned citizens trying to write a new constitution because the old one sucks, right?
That is, you know, about the nicest thing we can say.
They have demonstrated, even just in the small number of examples that you have raised, That they don't have the gist of what has to be true of a constitution for it to stand up.
Well, to be fair, I skipped a bunch of the early stuff that is sort of foundational.
There is some material in here.
I don't want to suggest that I have revealed the entire structure of this document.
It doesn't matter.
I would say, again, the question is You've got deal breakers where vague things that appear to suggest something that ought to govern the way law functions are presented in a way that You know, they can be abused, they can be weaponized, right?
They can be used to negate the very rights that are being described, and all I would say is, look, this Constitution writing stuff is really difficult, right?
Because you're writing a document for a future you have not yet seen, which means it cannot afford any fat.
You're going to make mistakes.
You have to write a document that places those in a position to interpret it with the power to do what is intended without the potential to be abused with the ability to amend the document so that errors that become obvious can be addressed but that the temptation to change it meets a viscosity that prevents it from being changed willy-nilly.
These are difficult tasks and All I would say is, A, the length of the document, if there's lots of stuff in there that is weird or didn't need to be said, is really just about, you know, what we like, what we aspire to, right?
That stuff shouldn't be in there because it's all architecture that can be used to unhook the protections that must be at the core of a constitution.
So I'm still looking for the science in here, right?
Science and technology must be developed according to the bioethical principles of solidarity, cooperation, like that's about what the goals of the scientists have to be, like what their underlying principles have to be.
I still don't see the science part.
So let me just walk through here every single example that my search reveals.
We have Article 178, and this is slightly out of order because of the way that I did the searches.
Paraphrasing, the state shall use advances in science to make life better for people.
Okay.
Vague.
Yeah.
Vague.
Better for current people at the expense of future people?
Right.
Vague at best.
Article 220, which is about the Autonomous Region, which is a political entity within the landscape of Chile, with regard to the Autonomous Region, the development of science is to be considered a competency.
So just like this list of things that ought to be thought about in developing the Autonomous Region.
It has nothing to do with actually encouraging science.
Article 95.
Article 95 is an interesting one, actually.
Or no, it's not.
The Constitution ensures to every person the protection of copyright over his intellectual, scientific, and artistic works.
That's it.
That's again not science.
And it is the duty, it continues later on, of the state to stimulate, promote, and strengthen the development of scientific and technological research in all areas of knowledge.
Maybe that's it.
Maybe that's what they're That's what everyone's on about.
It is the duty of the state to stimulate, promote, and strengthen the development of scientific and technological research in all areas of knowledge, thus contributing to the sociocultural enrichment of the country and the improvement of the living conditions of its inhabitants.
But again, how?
And what kind of science?
And how will it get funded?
And how will you guarantee that it gets funded?
And how?
How will you guarantee that the people asking questions that you don't like or coming up with answers that you don't like are still allowed to do their work if what they're doing is science?
Of course, it's not about science at all.
This is about a political agenda.
The last few instances of science or some form of the word science being mentioned in this Constitution, Article 35, Education is indispensable.
This is a paraphrase in part because it contributes to scientific, technological, economic, and cultural activity.
Article 61.
The state recognizes and guarantees the rights of individuals to benefit from scientific progress.
Okay.
Article 127.
The state should adopt an ecologically responsible administration and promote environmental and scientific education.
But Article 128, which immediately follows that, reveals the political nature of what is meant here.
Because they're using phrases like environmental justice and climate action.
So I think actually that that is the core of what is going on with this being promoted as a pro-science document.
Like I said, I'm saying nothing about what I think or what is actually true about the state of climate science, climate in the world, the changing climate, whether it's anthropogenic, anything.
If what you have is an incredibly long document that has as one of its core values the idea that the conclusion that is currently arrived at by those climates, by some group of scientists who are allowed to speak, that their conclusions are to be raised up into perpetuity in a document, that makes a document scientific?
No, that doesn't make a document scientific.
That makes a document conclusion-driven.
So, this reminds me actually, we were having a conversation with Toby about our son, who is studying the Declaration of Independence.
And I made an argument to him that the Declaration of Independence is an extremely important document, in part because it is so unusual.
And the way in which it is unusual, I think our founders Solved the problem that the authors of this document, whoever they may be, either deliberately failed to or just happened to have failed to solve.
The Declaration of Independence does not pretend to know how to do what it knows needs to be done.
It describes what needs to be done, as this document attempts to in several places, right?
But it does not pretend to be the document that lays out the structure.
And by separating these two things, by saying, look, when in the course of human events, right, this, that, and the other, here are the things that we must do, right?
But it doesn't say how.
And then the how document is very carefully architected.
There are errors in it, but... So are you arguing that this is basically trying to play the role of both the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution?
Well, I have to tell you... And the Bill of Rights?
Like, is that what you're...
I'm an alarm bell guy, right?
I see stuff coming.
It's not always there, but I am very alarmed by attempts at civilization architecting that have lots of room for abuse in them.
So this document definitely sets off enough alarm bells that I'm like, oh boy, that's a loser right there.
So I don't know what they were trying to do.
I don't know if it's an organic effort that just screwed up, or it's a non-organic effort, which I suspect.
But the point is, by fusing these two things, you create the undoing of the structure by the... The what from the how?
Those are the two things?
The what from the how.
The what and the why.
Right?
We aspire to a fair society.
Here are the rules we're going to lay out.
Because we consider these rights inalienable.
Right.
And the point is you don't need to amend the Declaration of Independence.
It is timeless.
Right?
It may be wrong in certain places, but in general the point is here's what we stand for.
And then how the hell are we going to do this?
You can upend, you could constitutional convention an entire new document about how we're going to do it.
But the point is this is still how we got here and why we had to do it.
And the now failed new Chilean constitution What you've read is so muddy in its understanding of what it's trying to accomplish that when it talks about how to accomplish it, it's like you haven't even...
You're protecting women and other people who can get pregnant, right?
I don't think, if you're honestly going to say we're going to protect women and other people who can get pregnant, I don't think you're up to the challenge of saying how to do it, right?
I think you've just told us you're not.
Yep, that's right.
So let me just wrap this up on A slightly high note, or at least a better note, which is the last two occurrences of some form of the word science that I find.
And that's it, unless search completely failed on me.
That's it in terms of what's in this supposedly science-heavy document.
We have in Article 135 that they will cooperate internationally in space research for peaceful and scientific purposes.
That's charming.
I like that.
I approve.
Yeah.
And Article 240, quote, from the translation, the state shall conserve, protect, and care for Antarctica through a policy based on knowledge and oriented towards scientific research, international collaboration, and peace.
And this is, you know, for those who don't realize where Chile is, this makes perfect sense.
Of course, Chile cares about and has a stake in Antarctica, and I hadn't predicted it, but cool, it gets its own article in this constitution, which failed, as it should have, but I like that it had an article in this constitution.
Yeah, I guess a couple things are being surfaced by this exploration.
One is that we have fallen into a... because humans now have a kind of remote relationship to the conduct of science, because science has become so technological.
We are defaulting now into team science.
I'm on team science against its opponents.
And team science isn't very scientific.
In fact, it's often anti-scientific.
Team science is super blue.
Super blue, yeah.
I didn't know science had a color.
Shouldn't science encompass all the colors?
The problem is that people do not know what to do with their noble desire to be on the scientific team.
When all teams are not scientific, many people correctly want to be on the scientific team, but they don't really understand what does, you know, that looks like science but it isn't, and this may not look like science but it is.
That's a hard thing to deal with.
And likewise, when it comes to something like a constitution, People do not know how to evaluate it, right?
The, you know, the Constitution, well, there are a lot of good things in this Constitution.
And then there's some things I can't interpret, and then there are a few things that alarm me, right?
Oh, that's a dead Constitution right there.
That's a Constitution you can't touch.
And it's a little like, you know, well, that's a pretty nice sculpture of a horse.
Yeah, but it's got an army in it.
Okay, but the sculpture's good, you know?
It's like, well, no!
That's a disguise for an army!
That's not a sculpture of a horse, right?
That was a gift!
It's a gift, and you wouldn't want to look it in the mouth and find the army inside, you know?
I mean, it's just...
Look, science does not work.
It's too different.
It's completely different.
Completely different, which I am feeling.
You're throwing my brain into disarray there.
That is my purpose on Earth.
Looking a gift horse in the mouth has nothing to do with Troy.
No, it has to do with a failure of gratitude and you're looking at his teeth to see whether it's healthy.
Yeah, okay.
Right.
Anyway, the point is, science and bullshit that happens in a lab but is about something else like profit or politics, those things look alike to somebody who's not pretty good at science, frankly.
You can dress something up to look like science and it can have nothing to do with science or it can be anti-scientific.
Lab coats are cheap.
Lab coats are cheap.
Oh, that's good.
It's easy to dress up like science.
It absolutely is.
And it's also easy for people who went into science to get dragged into something that isn't science but still uses beakers or, you know...
You know, I should...
I recently, because we moved, as we told you all last week, I ran into a bunch of my field gear, but in with my field gear was some of my lab gear, because I used to teach comparative anatomy back in the days when we were professors.
And so I have a couple lab coats, and I have my dissecting tools, and I feel like putting on my lab coat and wielding my scalpel and, you know, giving some really science-ish, but actually anti-scientific pronouncements.
Yeah, I don't love the scalpel part.
Okay, I'll use a... I can't even remember the names for any of my other tools at the moment, but I'll use something else.
Machete.
Butter knife.
Neither a machete nor a butter knife show up in my dissecting kit, guys.
It's similar to a scalpel, but less dangerous.
True, unless you're butter.
Okay, I'll use a blunt probe.
How about that?
Blunt probe, perfect.
Yes, perfect.
There it is.
That is... that's...
That's where I landed on the Chilean Constitution.
Yeah, well it's quite the thing and I wonder if it's not the first instance of something we increasingly have to be alarmed and aware of is the tendency Especially in a world where almost the only thing protecting us are these antiquated documents that don't quite work but nonetheless spelled certain stuff out so clearly that, you know, it's still difficult to get in the way of people's speech rights.
It's still awkward, for example.
And so I guess we have to be alert to the alteration of these last vestiges of a functional world.
Absolutely.
So let me actually, let me wrap it up this way by going back to this article in Nature.
Again, there were two of them that I talked about and I'll post them in the show notes.
The one from July 28th, before it was voted on, in a section called Boosting Science.
So this is Nature's having seen, having supposedly read, This document that I was just revealing highlights of.
Similar to the current constitution, the proposal mandates that the state stimulate science and technology.
Crucial for a country that, for the past decade, has consistently invested less than 0.4% of its gross domestic product in the fields.
So two points there.
Similar to the current constitution, so there's no change there.
And second point is, as I already commented, and as one of the Chilean scientists who didn't like this commented in one of these pieces, There's, without a guarantee of funding for science, what exactly is this protecting?
Right?
So, that's not boosting science.
Nature itself in this editorial has said, similar to the current constitution, and it says, "But it goes further "by adding that scientific achievements "and technological solutions should be used "to improve the life of Chileans.
"For example, one of its articles states, "says that the state should rely on science "to ensure the continuous improvement "of public services and goods." That's the evidence that nature is providing, and that's one of the articles that I read to you guys.
That's the evidence that nature is providing that this is a science-forward, science-heavy document.
And it's so weak, and it's worse than weak.
Yeah, it's empty.
It's at best empty.
Yeah.
And actually, it connects us to the next place we're going to go.
Actually, well, no, you're thinking of two steps down.
But one more quote from this July article in Nature.
Soledad Bertelsen, a legal researcher at the University of Los Andes in Santiago, worries that the proposed draft, again, this is the one that was just voted down, worries that the proposed draft lacks any mention of intellectual property rights, which are guaranteed in the current constitution.
It is an explicit step backwards, she says, adding that entrepreneurs might decide to move their investments out of Chile.
And using that word entrepreneurs there will make it seem to many naive readers of nature who think that they're purists and scientists and they don't, you know, oh well I'm not a business person so I don't care.
Actually, intellectual property rights matter to anyone who produces intellectual property.
Anyone who comes up with ideas that have the potential to be stolen and used by other people so that they can profit from them.
So, the idea that the current Constitution actually does have intellectual property rights protections and this one does not?
What the hell were they thinking?
Yeah, and it's the kind of thing, like, imagine that there was some
multi-billion dollar something at stake in Chile that you could write a big confusing document that had a lot of, you know, signals towards vague claims of environmental sustainability, justice, protecting the rights of children, and yada yada yada, and really the point is, oh yeah, it's all there as a lost leader to drag in this change in Chilean law that, you know, benefits I don't know who, but Yeah.
No, I mean, and so, you know, one of the articles I didn't read is they definitely were opposed to slavery.
And now, you know, anyone who voted against this, like, voted against the abolition of slavery.
Oh my god, this again, right?
Like this rhetorical trick again, over and over and over again.
So before we get to talking about myopia, which is where I know you thought we were going next, I just want to say something briefly, and this is actually apropos that Article 6 of the Constitution from Chile that just got voted down, which basically demanded 50% or more female representation at all public and even some semi-public Organizations, boards, it was worded strangely, I don't remember exactly.
Meanwhile, in, again, an article in Nature, although it's like somehow, yeah, in Nature, September 8th, 2022, we have a Nature News piece called, How We Boosted Our Numbers of Female Faculty Members.
Three researchers in Australia offer lessons from an affirmative recruitment initiative for women.
In 2016, Alex Ozarek, who was then head of the School of Mathematics and Statistics, undertook an affirmative action strategy, also known as positive discrimination, to recruit women as faculty members.
This was a controversial move, but it was prompted by a clear lack of diversity in the school.
Comment.
It was controversial, but the motives were good.
Yeah.
Sorry.
It was controversial, but one side was wrong.
Well, no, actually, I mean, okay, but my point is it was controversial, but they meant well.
It was controversial, but we were trying to do the right thing.
Okay, trying to do the right thing doesn't mean that the thing that you ended up doing was the right thing.
Recognizing that there is a problem.
So there's two different issues here.
Is there a problem?
We might disagree on that.
And is the solution that you've proposed to this problem the correct solution?
In this case, actually, I think that I disagree with both the fact that there is a problem that needs to be solved here, because we're already moving so far so fast in the right direction, and that the idea that the solution is what you're about to hear.
The strategy was designed as a catalyst for change.
It aimed specifically to increase the number of women in faculty positions, improve the professorial pipeline, and provide female role models for students.
Only women were eligible to apply for positions in areas in which women were underrepresented.
They literally created tenure-track STEM, that's science, technology, engineering, and math, faculty lines for which only women could apply.
That is batshit crazy.
That is just wrong on so many levels.
But get this, here's the next thing that I've got highlighted in this piece, again published September 8, 2022, in Nature.
Many of the successful applicants reported that they would not have applied had recruitment been open to both men and women, suggesting a perceived bias against female candidates in open recruitment.
Any woman in STEM who can get a faculty appointment I don't even know what to say here.
The idea that you got a job only that you would not have applied to had you been in competition against the entire relevant candidate pool, and that you're so okay with this that you said it and it's now in an article about how awesome this initiative is?
Well, that's ridiculous!
And those people...
A perceived bias against female candidates in open recruitment?
Even if there was a perceived bias against female candidates in open recruitment, which frankly I no longer... Yes, in the past, of course there has been.
We know this.
This is long since understood, right?
Of course there has been.
But the idea that there's a perceived bias now, I don't buy, maybe in a few rare places, in a few fields, a few old dudes who are still on committees, sure, right?
But a perceived bias against female candidates in open recruitment means you wouldn't apply for the job?
Are you kidding me?
How are you going to do science?
How are you going to be good at doing science if you won't apply when you think that there might be something that's not quite fair in the application process?
What is wrong with you?
Alright, two points.
One, that bias, which no longer exists in any significant degree, is going to be created.
It's going to be reinvented by this.
Because the point is, to the extent that you have these initiatives, they do open questions of competence.
Would you have been in that position if you had been in competition with, as you say, the full range of people from the field?
I don't know.
I wouldn't have applied.
Right.
But the other thing is, If you go back and read that statement.
The one I just read?
Yeah.
Suggesting.
Suggesting a perceived bias.
No, it doesn't.
not have applied had recruitment been open to both men and women.
Suggesting.
Suggesting a perceived bias against female candidates in open recruitment.
Suggesting a perceived bias.
No, it doesn't.
That sentence is a non sequitur.
It is a non sequitur.
It might imply that, but it could also suggest that these candidates were savvy enough to understand that given a limited budget of time, they were more likely to end up in a position if you'd eliminated half of the field based on its chromosomal complement or the kinds of gametes it produces.
Sorry, more than half the field.
Right.
Because these are fields in which men outnumber
Women at all of the levels and we can argue about whether or not that's due to bias and preschool and kindergarten and seventh grade and college and everything But frankly, I don't think so right but in this case It doesn't suggest that right the authors of the article have suggested that that was what it implies But there is a perfectly rational Mathematical explanation for why somebody would apply to such a position right that has nothing to do with bias at all Yep
Um, one more quote from this article.
On the right, which if you could see my screen here, they've got, this is in nature, this is in nature, Affirmative Action Recruitment Tips.
Bullet points.
The fifth bullet point under Affirmative Action Recruitment Tips, for those considering recruitment initiatives with an element of affirmative action, we offer some important lessons.
Don't be too specific about sub-disciplines.
Keep your selection criteria broad to widen the pool of female applicants.
I think it speaks for itself.
It's preposterous.
If we go back several years to some of our earlier discussions, not necessarily on Dark Horse, but discussions of what this woke revolution was doing.
Basically, if you imagine a world in which nothing is actually real, so the quality of your scientists and your engineers and your pilots and your doctors doesn't really matter, really the point is, hey, it's unfair that this field of brain surgeons, you know, disproportionately has, you know, Swedes, right?
And so we're going to get some people from... You're talking about turnips?
Or Swedish people?
I'm talking about Swedish people.
Oh wait, are Swedes turnips or rutabagas?
Not sure.
I honestly have no dog in the fight, nor do I have any inkling about which of the root vegetables that suggest.
But the point is...
You can't just say, well, you know, it's a tragedy that X group of people isn't represented in brain surgery or aviation and say, well, whatever we have to do to correct that as soon as possible is the thing to do.
The point is actually, no, I want really good pilots and really good brain surgeons.
And that's true, irrespective of why there's a bias.
Maybe the bias actually does reflect some discrimination, but we're gonna have to think very carefully.
about how to get some people properly qualified to do brain surgery.
And we're still going to have to assess them based on merit.
And some of the people might have the mind for brain surgery, but they're not going to have the hands for it.
And we really want all brain surgeons who have both the mind and the hands and aren't afraid of blood and whatever it is, right?
You can't just get people into positions and say, problem solves because you may have just caused a different problem, like the bridges are falling down and the brains don't work after the surgeons get to them and stuff like that.
So, you know, I think there's a way in which this crazy revolutionary movement does not actually understand that the world is real.
That's right.
Right?
That it requires actual expertise and not just the pretense of expertise in order to do the difficult jobs well and that if you just put people in those positions because you like the composition of the room better you may be compromising something fundamental and functional about our system.
However it got that way.
Yep.
And that's, you know, this is a drumbeat that we have been at for a long time.
But A, this is why we and others see in this revolution post-modernism done badly, very, very badly at its roots.
But also the thing that we talk about that is somewhat different from that, that we talk about in A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide and elsewhere, is One of the outgrowths of a frivolous understanding of the post-modern understanding of the world that some reality is socially created is that if all of your world exists in this social landscape, you may come to imagine that the entire world
Exist in a social landscape and therefore come to imagine that actually physics isn't real and no no one is going to say that actually out loud but you know the example that I like to use is the Roadrunner cartoons where when the Roadrunner dupes the coyote yet again into running off the edge of a cliff it's really funny
When Wile E. Coyote doesn't fall until he himself looks down and recognizes that there's no land beneath him and that therefore gravity should be affecting him at the point that he comes to recognize the situation he's in, then he falls.
Stupid coyote.
And he doesn't fall until then.
It's super funny.
Why?
Because even the three-year-olds watching that cartoon know that that's not how gravity works.
Right?
It's really funny when it's a cartoon coyote.
It's not funny when you're raising your kids, protecting them from all physical stuff, and only giving them social things to think about, and you end up with these children in the bodies of adults running around making claims like men can get pregnant.
It comes from the lack of experience with the physical world and some really deep-seated belief, even though they wouldn't say it out loud, that reality isn't real.
That it can be negotiated.
So, like, everyone needs to have at least one skill, one set of experiences with the physical world, be it with hiking, or carpentry, or even baking, you know?
Something where you can't say afterwards, eh, actually, it looks like I failed, but I didn't fail, here's why.
Right?
We all need that.
100%.
It is the core of an education, just even for common sense.
Yeah.
I do want to point out, there's one thing about the Wile E. Coyote situation that I always feel is missing from these discussions, and I'm going to put it on the record here.
Do it.
The most interesting thing, and I think the funniest thing about the Wile E. Coyote bit, is that it's not that the physics is all social.
It is arbitrarily social, right?
The Roadrunner knows.
Well, no, no.
No.
The physics of friction fails the coyote as he runs off the cliff.
The fact that he continues to run does not continue to propel him because he has nothing to push against.
But gravity requires his recognition before it kicks in, right?
So it's like a world in which some physics is real and some physics is about your, you know, accepting of it.
And anyway, I always find that juxtaposition.
Absolutely.
Yeah, you get skidding.
Skidding represents real physical forces.
Yeah, the normal force requires your recognition, but the static friction of the feet against the ground, not so much.
That's real.
Yep.
All right.
Finally.
Finally.
You pointed me, just a half an hour before we came on, to an article in the upcoming issue of The Atlantic, which is available now.
Yes, to which I was pointed by Kevin Fothy, a friend and longtime supporter of the podcast.
In any case, it's a very interesting article, also deeply frustrating.
I almost feel like it requires a paragraph by paragraph... what's another word for deconstruction that doesn't involve deconstruction?
But we haven't said it, you have to describe it.
I will describe the article here.
The article is about the growing epidemic of myopia, actually globally.
And I want to start, though, with a personal story.
But it's been particularly noticed in East and Southeast Asia.
In Asia, yes.
And it is now being noticed in the West, and there's a difference in how Asians have dealt with it and how it's being dealt with in the West.
But just one more thing before you tell your story.
The standard story among Western-trained eye doctors is it's genetic.
And somehow it's the very rare, and highlighted in this article, doctor of ophthalmology who says, yeah, but why then are so many more children showing up with myopia when their parents don't necessarily have it?
So I would say that a little differently.
The story has been that it was genetic, and the rate at which it is accelerating has forced Those who make that claim to back off it because it's clearly so implausible.
But the article describes it as like, this is the standard.
Right.
It has been.
But my point is going to be, this was nonsense from the get-go.
It was always obvious that was a dumb explanation.
And in any case, let me tell my little anecdotal story.
So, I was a child once and I had terrible eyesight.
You know, the kind that makes parents fret and eye doctors discuss exotic solutions.
I had an astigmatism and I was prescribed bifocal glasses.
As a child I had bifocal glasses.
I was sentenced to Exercises in which one eye was to be patched for half an hour at a time every day of the week, I believe.
Anyway, here's the thing.
I was the kind of... How compliant were you?
Not even a little.
Shocking?
Yeah, shocking knowing me, right?
But okay, so that is a very, very sad story except for what happens next.
Right?
My eyes completely cure themselves.
I've had great eyesight and I went until just the cusp of 50 before I needed to actively do anything for my reading.
I could read, I had great distance vision, I still have great distance vision.
What happened?
Well, it was obvious to me that there was something about what we are all told about eyes that just isn't right.
The story that eyes that were so badly formed that they required all of this elaborate technology and these, you know, ruthless interventions in order to get them to function well enough for me to live a normal life, right?
The fact that that turned out to be false is inconsistent with the basic explanation of how vision works.
In other words, if my eyes were malformed as a kid, the chances that they would become well-formed as an adult are essentially zero.
Right?
Unless you have a developmental process that has a feedback in it.
Right?
Malformed eyes as a kid could be even more malformed as an adult if whatever process was off kilter continued to go off kilter.
But what happened to me implies that there is a feedback inside of development that perceives the malformation of the eyes and corrects it.
Okay?
What I did not understand, because I had heard the, you know, well, the shape of your eyes is clearly a genetic phenomenon, blah blah blah, What I did not understand is the shape of your eyes.
Yes, the basic shape is specified by the genes, but there is muscular architecture which modifies these things.
And if what you do is you put a corrective lens in front of your eyes, then you are denying your eyes the information by which they might self-correct.
So, I've been grumbling to myself, as you know, for decades about the fact that the huge fraction of the population that needs glasses as kids...
Um, is obviously downstream of the fact that we are interrupting a developmental process.
A, we are doing something that is causing the eyes to be malformed in the first place.
Very likely that has to do with an alteration between, uh, an alteration of the environment and the distance at which we typically work.
You know, a hunter-gatherer child may be doing a little bit of close work, but they're doing an awful lot of distance work.
And we are doing an awful lot of close work, and maybe there's nothing to be done about that, but there's a basic hyper-novelty question here.
Well, there's certainly something to be done about the fact that many people are getting no distance vision.
No distance vision.
This is one of the three things we advise at the end of every podcast, right?
Get outside.
There are competing ideas as written in this article about what's the benefit of getting outside even though all these ophthalmologists are now saying, "Yeah, you should spend more time outside." Is it the bright sunlight or is it the open spaces?
It's probably both.
Right.
Well, so there's also something missing from this article.
There's a lot missing.
There's a lot missing, but, you know, they talk about the fact that, you know, people have suspected that the close work might be a problem, but it's difficult to demonstrate because, you know, for every kid who has a problem, whether there's another kid who doesn't have a problem with it, yada, yada, yada.
Hypothesis for you.
That this feedback involved in correcting the shape of the eye, getting the eye to be approximately spherical, which it should be rather than oblong.
That feedback is also sensitive to what you are looking at.
What is the effect of looking at something that's this far away from you that appears to be something very far away from you?
If you are looking at a picture of mountains, or you were looking at a screen on which mountains are displayed, you are sending a completely inconsistent signal.
Maybe there's a flag for, oh, distant object.
Oh, I'm looking at a distant object.
How distant?
Oh, it's about seven or eight inches from my eye, you know?
So, what does that do to your development, right?
Yeah.
In any case, I want to go back to the article and I want to talk about a couple of things just to place it in context.
I do recommend people look at this article.
I would recommend that they extract the value from it.
The description of our awakening to what we're doing to our children and the various things that may be done to prevent this from happening to children who haven't yet suffered from this or are only beginning to, right?
That is a very useful article.
But the article is completely maddening in the way it portrays this and in the way it effectively defends the superstitions of ophthalmology into the present.
How many children have we damaged because we haven't gotten serious about this until now when it has been obvious that we should have been for at least many decades?
All right, so I wanted to connect it to the Dark Horse episode in which I talk to Steve Patterson about the Dark Age, which he and I both believe is happening.
We have a slightly different take on it, but we had a very good discussion.
I suggest people watch it.
One of the things that I love about Steve's take on the Dark Age He has a list of things that are contributing to the darkness, right?
What is blinding scientists to what is in front of them?
And my favorite of them is he says there is a chronic tendency to underestimate the complexity of the system being looked at, right?
In other words, if you have a kind of Bio 101 textbook view of physiology and genetics, You have the idea, oh, there are genes.
They describe how to build a person.
And, you know, they basically blueprint the morphology, right?
So if your eyes are the wrong shape, it's probably because your genes are spelled wrong, right?
No, there aren't nearly enough genes to blueprint a body.
What there are, are Very simple rules that cause a body to emerge in light of information that is encountered in the physical universe.
And the eyes are a prime candidate for this sort of thing because, you know, your heads are different sizes.
You've got two parents who may come from different parts of the world.
What the hell gene would you even write for that?
You need a system in which two half genomes can come together Having come from different environments, with different levels of close and distant work and all of that, and they can produce an eye that works.
How do you do that?
There has to be feedback at every level and at every moment.
Right.
And so one of the places I would say we chronically misunderstand biology is we tend to look at the adult organism and we look at the genome and we say, Genes say how you get there, and then we ignore the fact that there's this very long process of development in which the body gets to discover how it interacts with the world and correct all sorts of processes.
And the eye, nothing is more important than whether you can see the important things in your world, the things relevant to your fitness.
So the idea that, oh, your eye is misshapen, right?
Oh, well, you happen to have muscles that can adjust the shape of the thing, right?
Yeah, the extrinsic eye muscles are extraordinary, and even on a shark, which is a remote ancestor of ours, just to go back to comparative anatomy space, it is obvious in retrospect How much selection is built into the ability to not just move around, but shape the shape of the eye orbit and the eye itself.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
And you know, this is a soft optic, right?
It's all about the shape of that thing and some very simple physics.
And if you deny it information about what it's actually seeing, especially by correcting it, the point is out.
These work great.
They work great with that thing in front of them.
They don't work very well at all without it.
There's also lots in this piece that goes to some other issues which are places where we chronically underestimate the complexity of the systems that we are trying to understand and ostensibly fix.
One of them is, in this article it is described that there's this issue where part of the story that suggested that, you know, the eyes are basically becoming less functional because of bad genes, right?
A simple bad genes argument has to do with heritability, right?
And the fact that, you know, identical twins had worse You know, had eyesight that was more closely correlated than fraternal twins, right?
Which seems to, you know, in many people's minds, it just, it locks up the question, you know, permanently.
It answers it.
And now in this article, they say something along the lines of, yes, but, you know, identical twins share more than just genes.
They also share a lot of the same influences, right?
And this is a strange claim, but it is
One of the things that dogs that claims of heritability and their implications about genes is that people leap from the idea that the heritability of something and heritability is defined as a genetic term it is I think mistakenly but formally defined as the degree to which a alteration in form is the result of a genetic variant.
This Ignores the mechanism by which these variants have their implications, right?
So, you'll help me get this into clarity that people will be able to understand.
Let's say that we had... I'm just going to describe the problem with heritability.
Even where we actually measure correctly that it is there, we misunderstand the implications.
Can we pause for a second, though?
Can you go back?
So, you said this thing about twins, and I had missed that in my read of the article, and I just went and looked at it.
Can I just read the paragraph here?
Because I don't understand what they're doing.
Please.
Yeah.
This is, again, a sentence from this article on myopia in The Atlantic this month.
By now, scientists have moved past the faulty assumption that myopia is purely genetic.
The idea took hold in the 60s when studies of twins showed that identical twins had more similar patterns of myopia than fraternal ones, and persisted in the academic world for decades.
DNA does indeed play a role in myopia, but the tricky factor here is that identical twins don't just share the same genes.
They're exposed to many of the same environmental stimuli, too.
Well, I don't understand I don't understand how the last phrase of the last sentence strikes me as a totally bizarre place to end that.
Yeah, it is a bizarre thing, and I think it's sort of a hand-waving argument.
I don't know if what they've elided is identical twins raised apart, or it's not clear what they've missed, but they've missed a factor in there to explain why they're making the argument.
It would appear, if you just read this, it would appear that they're arguing that identical twins share more environmental stimuli than do fraternal twins.
So let me make my heritability argument, and then we're going to defend this bad paragraph.
We're going to steal mana.
Okay.
So let's take a totally separate, non-vision characteristic, and let's create a phony scenario in which we're going to see what's wrong with the modern instantiation of heritability.
Let us say that a population of Blue Creatures has been enslaved by a population of Orange Creatures.
In the enslaving process, the Blue Creatures were portrayed as less intelligent in order to justify the hierarchy of power.
Let's just say it's nonsense, but that was said.
That's the story the Orange Creatures told themselves.
That was the story the orange creatures used to rationalize their enslavement, their enslavement of the blue creatures.
And then let's say that time passes and the blue creatures find their way to freedom somehow, and they now have to get along with the orange creatures.
But the story in the orange population persists that the blue creatures are less capable.
Now, what if you went and you measured the degree of blueness and some capacity like intelligence, right?
And you found that it was indeed a bit lower.
That's trouble.
But the problem is you don't know why the blue creatures are exhibiting this feature.
In other words, discrimination by the orange creatures, who have the power at the point the blue creatures earn their freedom, is going to result in lots of things being poorly distributed.
Things that might be enriching in childhood, etc.
The point is, you might actually find a Heritability, that is to say a genetic factor that does predict something about capacity, but it may be that that factor has nothing to say about how that capacity comes to be.
What it does is it, you know, if you found that, you know, blue scales or whatever is on the surface of these creatures was correlated with low capacity, it is entirely possible that though genetically heritable it has nothing to do with with that gene describing anything that creates capacity.
What that thing does is it describes a pigment that causes a creature to be discriminated against, which results in developmentally that characteristic being less elaborated.
Does that make sense?
So the point is... The blueness, the thing that is actually genetically heritable, may not be coupled at a genetically heritable level with the capacity in this case.
Right, it's like... But the phenotypic The phenotypic thing that shows on the outside can be recognized by others and so can be used to basically, you know, collect and do something collectively to those.
Right.
And actually let me take it one step more absurd just to make it really clear.
Let's imagine that there was a gene for a sign that would emerge on your back that says kick me.
That's all the gene does.
It just produces this sign on your back that says, kick me.
And that people listen to the sign.
Now that sign that says kick me is going to produce all kinds of other phenomena, right?
You're going to be fearful, you're going to constantly be up against walls, your behavior is going to be altered by the fact that you've been born with a sign that says kick me on your back, right?
Fearfulness is actually an adaptive response, but it itself is not genetically heritable.
Well no, that's the thing I'm trying to convey.
But it could become.
It is genetically heritable.
It is genetically heritable.
The gene that produces the kick me sign produces fear.
It does not produce fear by altering your... Indirectly.
It doesn't matter.
Doesn't matter.
From the point of view of how we study heritability, what we have is this gene is correlated with that phenotypic characteristic.
The mechanism is not specified.
And so, my point is, heritability itself is a broken concept, in part because all sorts of things that alter your phenotype in one way or the other may indirectly cause these things, which are not downstream of the gene itself, but are downstream of some characteristic that it produces.
And we infer something because of our overly simple genetic model of the universe.
Right, but I think maybe you misheard me.
I was very precise in saying it's genetically heritable, as opposed to heritable, which is the Senzuato description.
It is genetically heritable.
This is what I'm telling you.
If you go to the literature, Where the term heritability is used, this error is all over the place.
We assume that genetically heritable means the consequence of the spelling of the gene.
That's not what it means, right?
It is a correlation that is agnostic with respect to mechanism.
And so this has lots of implications, right, for claims that people make.
Which we won't go into here, but nonetheless it is an error that is extremely hazardous because it allows us to rationalize things as well.
That's features of the underlying genetic biology of the situation.
Okay, so let's get there.
The point here is to correctly say, to correctly identify, oh that thing is heritable.
is in no way to say that thing is immutable.
Right.
Now, with an individual, it might well be, right?
But it is in no way to say, therefore, you got it, I'm sorry, your kids are doomed to have it as well.
They're not.
Right.
It is exactly that issue.
Basically, when people get to the point of, well, it's genetically heritable, they believe that what they have said is immutable.
And they may have said nothing of the kind, right?
You may be able to completely democratize something into fairness, even though it was genetically heritable.
You may be able to remove it from genetic heritability if it is not the consequence of a genetic spelling producing this thing as a matter indifferent to the world outside.
Okay, so now let's go back to steelmanning that paragraph.
Which I don't believe deserves steelmanning.
I think it's just an error.
But nonetheless, you could say... The paragraph which is about identical twins, and which ends by saying, the tricky factor here is that identical twins don't just share the same genes, they're exposed to many of the same environmental stimuli too.
Right.
Now, here's the thing.
Identical twins look alike.
So to the extent that they are broadcasting signals into the world that then cause the world to treat them in such a way, they may cause similar phenomena to emerge.
And it is conceivable.
It is at least within the realm of... So reducto ad absurdum, or however that's pronounced, with the don't kick me sign.
If you have a genetic tendency to produce a don't kick me sign on you.
If identical twins have some similar thing that they are producing in the world and therefore getting the same feedback from it.
There you go.
Even if they haven't met since they were born.
That is exactly it.
That is exactly it.
Okay, so... Okay.
Yeah, I mean it's pretty good for rescuing a paragraph that's pretty hard to logically defend.
Yeah.
Okay, I want to make several points about this myopia paper.
One, A, this is a classic case of hyper-novelty.
I wanted to title this section, Hyper-Novelty is a Bitch.
Hyper-Novelty is a Bitch.
This is a classic hyper-novelty problem, and it has several of the annoying characteristics of these things.
One of them is, I am sad to say that although I have been aware of the problem of us having a hyper novelty issue with development and vision, We did not fully protect our children from this.
It's effectively impossible to do.
Right?
Zach needs glasses.
And the fact that Zach needs glasses... Trivially, though.
Well... Not to the extent that I do.
Yeah.
He's not... Now I only wear them to drives, pretty much.
Okay.
I take them off every other time, but... And you're not... Alright, so I don't know to what degree people could hear that.
Zach says now he only needs them to drive.
Can do everything else without.
And, you know, I don't know what your diopter is, but you're like 20-40.
Which is really not that bad.
Which just means that what someone with perfectly normal vision can see at 40 feet, you need to be 20 feet away from it to see it.
I have a sense that it may be getting better.
I don't know though.
It may well be getting better.
Someone with something like 2800 vision can't exactly get away with that.
Does it matter what you're driving at?
You don't have to answer that.
No, it's not a very good point.
You're very good at calling me out when I make a not a very good point, which is too frequently.
But here's the thing.
A, I do think you may find that it gets better, especially in light of the fact that Like all kids now, you had a lot of close-in stuff put in front of you before, and your interests are now more diverse in terms of the distance that they are from you, and that may well provide the feedback, and even though it's late in your development, it may not be too late to partially or maybe even fully correct.
Right.
Yeah, you're damned if you do damage or don't.
But my point is, there are lots of these problems where The fact that you know about it provides you some tool, but it doesn't provide you enough.
Like, you're now stuck, as a modern parent, you're stuck with, do I raise my child in some way?
Do I, you know, freak out when they sit down to read?
Right?
Because they may be damaging their feedback mechanism.
Or do I accept that reading has become dominant enough that allowing a certain amount of degradation of distance vision is worthwhile?
Right?
I don't know what to do with that.
I didn't know what to do with it, you know, in our kid's case.
I don't know what to do with it.
I don't know what to recommend.
Here's the maddening place that the article ends, right?
The article makes the exact right connection without linking to Mike Mew.
It connects this failure of the eyes to develop correctly because we've denied them the proper feedback.
And it says the same thing appears to have happened with teeth, right?
Oh my goodness, yes it has!
The jaw is misshaped because we are not chewing on resistant enough stuff early enough in development.
And then it says the absolutely stupidest thing it could say.
Can I read it?
Yeah.
So I'm going to read the penultimate paragraph too, because I think that recovers the article a little bit, but then I'll read the final paragraph.
We may not know exactly how ogling screens all day and spending so much time indoors are affecting us, or which is doing more damage, but we do know that myopia is a clear consequence of living at odds with our biology.
The optometrists I spoke with all said they try to push better vision habits, such as limiting screen time and playing outside.
But this only goes so far.
Today, taking a phone away from a teenager may be no more practical than feeding a toddler a raw hunter-gatherer diet.
So, this is where we've ended up.
Oh, incidentally, a raw hunter-gatherer diet?
Yeah.
Hunter-gatherers were not eating raw foods.
That's... anyway.
I'm going to stop.
You're probably talking about feeding them a raw hunter-gatherer.
So this is where we've ended up.
For those of us who can afford it, adding chemicals and putting pieces of plastic in our eyes every day in hopes of tricking them back to their natural state.
So, it is the point before this where they say, they correctly say, oh, this is analogous to what has happened with the spread of the need for orthodontia, right?
True.
And then they say, but it's marvelous because we know what to do with orthodontia.
We put braces on your teeth and Get them straight, which is insane.
That does not correct the misshapen jaw, right?
It is a terrible kluge put on top of an unnecessary dysfunction that is actually totally remediable if you understand it from the get-go, right?
So, there's also a market aspect to what is revealed by this article, right?
There is enthusiasm about braces because it doesn't make the entire field of orthodontia go away, it makes it profitable.
Right?
If you understand why malocclusion happens, then you also understand what is necessary to make it a very rare phenomenon.
And if it's a very rare phenomenon, we won't need many orthodontists, will we?
Right?
So no, that can't be the answer.
The answer has to be, we've got a modern problem and there's nothing to do about it.
So what we have to do is aggressively come in with high-tech stuff and wizardry and fix your children by putting tension on their teeth, which, by the way, will wreck your Teeth's roots, if it's done badly, as happened in my case.
So, the problem is what?
It's going to mess with your skull.
It's probably going to mess with your eyes.
And the number of pathologies that are downstream of malocclusion is high because it's not your teeth that are out of place.
It's your jaws, which are misshapen, which has effects on your breathing.
It has effects on allergies.
It has effects on attention deficit.
All sorts of things are implicated.
And interesting, there are three remedies in the piece for the eye misshapenness.
Two of them correct the light coming into it to give them a signal that development can follow to fix the eye, which is Truly interesting, right?
That's a great, it's the opposite of glasses which correct your vision coming into the eye so your eye doesn't know it's misshapen, right?
It distorts the light coming in so that your eye will reform in the right way.
One of them being drops that dilates your pupils, which apparently, interesting little note from the article, is something that Cleopatra used to make her appear more sultry.
Yeah, yeah, I thought that was pretty interesting too.
But all right, I'm mostly at the end of my rant.
This is both a marvelous article in terms of what it reveals.
This is finally dawning on people.
We are at least 30 years late in the recognition.
What we needed in order to understand that we were doing this to our own children has been apparent for a very long time.
We have been slow to get there and in some sense I think the hidden message here is we're only now getting there now that we have some way to sell you a solution rather than to prevent the problem from happening.
Right?
And that this has become what the market does to all branches of medicine including orthodontia, dentistry, ophthalmology, right?
It wants to sell you a solution more than it wants to prevent the problem from happening and it is a terrible pathology for a medical system to have.
Yeah, and there's so much analogy to the experience with COVID as well, wherein this was a monster of our own creation.
And the people who worked hard to create it are now trying to cover their tracks and pretend it came from nature.
And regardless of where it came from, we are told you absolutely need our fixes to help you get fixed.
And it's just the same story over and over again.
Yeah, they want to portray themselves as the hero rescuing us from a terrible villain from nature, when in fact they are the villain.
And then they are the villain again in selling you a remedy that has these gigantic costs, which they weren't honest with us about.
And it's like, okay, how many times are we going to fall for this pseudo-scientific garbage by the people who are nominally our scientific leaders?
When are we just going to start following reason?
All those still being fooled at this point.
Shame on you.
Fool me once, shame on you.
Fool me twice, shame on me.
So everyone who's still fooled.
Wake up.
Wake up.
Yep.
Time to wake up.
All right.
Are we there?
I think we are there.
Okay.
We are going to take a break, get some more ducks in a V, and we will be back in 15 minutes or so with a Q&A.
With the chat, they'll be live on Odyssey.
Again, you can ask questions at darkhorsesubmissions.com.
You can always email logistical questions, like, where do I ask questions?
To darkhorsemoderator at gmail.com, but just the logistical questions there.
And please consider joining our Patreons.
Again, the question asking period for the private Q&A that happens the last Sunday of the month is open right now at my Patreon.
Again, if you are interested in these kinds of conversations, but especially the conversation that we're just having about myopia and hyper-novelty, and how to behave in a way that you are more likely to have a body and brain in sync with one another and with nature, consider getting A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, where we discuss this and more.
And apropos this week and always, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, And get outside.
