In this 158th 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 cancellation. How do mobs get to people and coerce them? Once cancelled, how immune are you? What are the lessons learned when going through the looking glass? Also: why do searches for “alpha male” and “gender norms” yield such bizarre results? And: why are we allowing the phrase “Adult Attracte...
- Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast, live stream number 158.
No need to worry that it might be only divisible by one in itself.
That's not gonna happen here.
Nope.
Yep.
All of your concerns were unfounded.
They were.
They were needless.
I wish I could have that effort back, but... Oh, I didn't mean your concerns.
Oh.
You knew it at a glance.
I did.
Right away.
Yeah.
Just that good.
Yes.
To think back to last week's discussion, it's a weak superpower, that one.
It's a weak superpower.
Well, the thing is, if you're going to do it just by checking to see whether it's an even number, you've got to be real careful, because you can get tripped up.
Can you?
Yes, very much so.
I'm not aware of this.
You aren't?
No.
Oh.
Down in the area of 2.
There is a discussion as to whether 2 is prime.
No, I think it's a question about whether or not zero is prime.
Isn't that right?
Oh no, it's one that's the confusing one.
No, but I guess you're right.
Two is an even prime.
It's the only even prime.
As far as we know.
I should say that just to be perfectly careful, even though mathematically there is no reason to be careful at all.
Just start out in the weeds this week.
Decided to do that.
Is it in the weeds, not on the weed?
No, not so.
So this week we're going to talk a little bit about a number, a wide variety of things.
And maybe instead of trying to figure out how those all go together in advance, just wait for it.
But let's do the top of the hour stuff first.
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Pretty much, yep.
And if you're watching on YouTube, you can also watch on Odyssey Live.
That's where the chat is going on, and of course then the video will also be up on Spotify, and the audio is up, you know, everywhere you find podcasts.
So, and we know that most of our audience is listening only.
So we have some interesting visuals this week, but we will try to describe them.
Although it may, in a few cases, be difficult to fully describe.
They may defy description.
They may defy description, yes.
Yes, and we don't have the pictures worth... how many words? 10,000?
I believe that after inflation, maybe.
What is it?
What is it?
I think it's a thousand.
It's just a thousand?
It's the usual claim.
Yeah, you're... I'm just going to order some.
Yeah, you're only one order of magnitude off.
Stupid math territory for the entire top of the hour.
Okay.
Okay.
I will now get out of the weeds as well.
Consider finding me where I write at Natural Selections.
This last week I wrote a bit about dominance hierarchies and gender norms in humans.
The week before I wrote about beavers and their foundational role in In basically architecting the landscapes of North America and the ecosystems of North America.
And yesterday we dropped an episode on the same topic in which you were talking to the wonderful Jacob Shockey, who is a former student of ours and a friend of ours.
And you had an almost three-hour conversation.
Almost three-hour conversation.
And then, as you know, Jacob stuck around and we did some fun stuff.
It turned out there was just a whole lot of stuff that he had to say about beavers that is going to have to wait for a volume two because, you know.
Absolutely.
There's some very interesting stuff that didn't make it into the podcast.
Yeah, and I haven't listened to the entire podcast yet.
I did read the piece that I wrote on account of having written it, and a couple of the points that have stuck with me specifically are the mitigating effect on loss of biodiversity and on extreme weather and climate conditions like drought and flood.
And fire, especially in the American West.
And then also the fact that, and I know that you talked about this in your conversation with Jacob as well in the Dark Horse podcast that dropped yesterday, but that the beaver trappers were so successful at what they did.
And still, to this day, the beavers that remain are very docile.
So it's interesting that the intensive beaver trapping over hundreds of years did not have the selective effect on the behavior, on the personality.
of beavers that you might expect, that they remain easy to approach in many regards.
But they were effectively eradicated through so much of the American West that when the eminent naturalist Grinnell came through in the, I think it was the 1930s,
His natural history notes from his tour of the American West basically framed, you know, put into place an expectation among ecologists of what we were trying to recover to, which of course is always a dicey proposition, you know, aiming for a single moment in a shifting over both space and time
landscape, but he saw, Grinnell saw, so, so little beavers, that even so few beavers, depending on if it's a collective noun or not, and, you know, like us, did not infer from the landscape that what he was seeing was extraordinary evidence of an abundance of beavers throughout, you know, many, many tens of thousands at least of years.
The ghost of beavers past.
Yes, that he said, you know, he basically made a number of claims based on what he saw, but he then made inference that was wrong, and from that we have historical range maps that are inaccurate, because they're based on this great naturalist who was normally so good at what he did, but even he did not see through basically the fog of time.
So I wanted to add one thing to that.
So probably because beavers were trapped primarily, the remnant of their approachability might not be a strong indicator of how selected they were by that interaction.
And in fact, well actually this runs a little bit counter to what I just said, but what I learned from Jacob after the podcast
Was that although it has been generally our experience, your and mine, and generally accepted by most people who talk about beavers in a scientific context, that they are nocturnal, that there's actually good reason to think that that is a switch, that they have moved into a nocturnal niche, presumably to avoid people.
And that the evidence for this, which is... Because trappers are lazy.
Or because not all beavers go nocturnal at once, and so you evade the trappers.
Yeah, but also just because we're diurnal, and so we're not as good at hunting at night.
So anyway, you hobble... Lazy for good reason.
Yeah, right.
Lazy as a matter of self-preservation in large measure.
But the lack of the tapetum, lucidum, in the eye, that is the reflective surface that causes nocturnal animals' eyes to shine, if you ever shine a flashlight at a dog at night, You see the eyes shine back.
That absence suggests that this was not initially a nocturnal creature.
And it's interesting, I know another story where a creature has moved into diurnality by the same mechanism, which is a very strange thing.
Well, for the same reason.
For the same reason.
And this is the one and only example of a bat that is diurnal.
That bat appears to have been nocturnal in origin, but it is hunted by people in the roost, and so it pays to be out when people are up doing their hunting.
So just this is a macro or mega whatever mega mega mega chiropractor.
So this is one of the like flying foxes.
This is one of these big beefy bats that actually would provide, you know, sustenance for a family of humans, as opposed to these little micro bats that we've got here in the new world.
More of a snack bat.
Yeah, this is a full meal bat.
Alright, I take it back.
But in any case, interesting that beavers do appear to have been modified in this way, and it hasn't changed their approachability so much, but it has changed the likelihood of an encounter based on them being primarily nocturnal.
Although I will say, at least two of the instances In which I've seen beavers, it was during the day.
Right.
One in Oaks Bottom down in Portland and one you and I saw a beaver I want to say Eastern Washington somewhere.
Yeah, it was.
It was in the Cascades.
Very interesting animal that we got to watch quite a bit.
I was also reminded of a... It's funny.
I found Jacob during the podcast talked a little bit about the fact that his first encounter with a beaver had been at the bus stop at the loop at Evergreen that one had trundled by and we had both remarked...
He'd never seen a beaver before that?
I don't think so.
Interesting.
Given where he grew up, that's interesting.
Anyway, his point was he should have followed it because what the hell was it doing there?
There's no obvious reason for a beaver to be there.
And then as I was falling asleep last night, I realized...
That there was an episode in my teaching at Evergreen where I didn't see a beaver but I was biking along the bike path on the main road there and I saw a beaver sign, right?
I saw a place where beavers had chewed some sticks and it's in a little culvert, right?
No place that a beaver could possibly hope to create any kind of useful pond and I had I had brought my students and my co-faculty there and they disbelieved me that it was real.
And so anyway, Jacob's observation of a beaver, you know, what would be a block and a half from where I found beaver sign is interesting there for whatever reason they're active up on the road there.
Yeah, no, and I actually think, no one else will know the particular geography of the area around Evergreen, but yeah, I actually am remembering areas that now, now that I think on it, feel, feel beaverful to me.
Yeah, and in fact there is one across that road.
There is a, there is a wetland that is otherwise inexplicable.
Yeah.
So I'm thinking that's it.
So check both of those things out.
Check out the podcast, the Dark Horse podcast from yesterday, and my Natural Selections piece from two weeks ago.
And we'll continue, hopefully we'll have Jacob back, and we'll continue talking about this.
Okay, still top-of-the-hour stuff.
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So this seems like an illegitimate move, as we've mentioned over and over and over again.
So, you know, they are the only ones seeing benefit from running ads on our material.
And so we appreciate even more than if they had not done that, your support in any way that you can give it.
You can join one of our Patreons, where you can get access to our Discord community.
They have They have conversations ongoing with people young and old, left and right, you know, all the demographics you might be able to think of, and you aren't dismissed on account of having one or more or lacking one or more demographic markers, unlike so many of the conversations that seem to be happening these days.
So, yeah.
I just wanted to say, Maybe the most important way to support us is actually spread the word, because one of the ways, you know, yes, they demonetized us, which is a very aggressive and direct move.
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Mm-hmm.
Yeah, and you won't feel unsafe in their presence, I expect.
That really depends on you.
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I'm wondering if Eric has a beekeeper, and whether in that case I would be my brother's beekeeper's keeper.
I don't know.
It's a question.
No, you're not your brother's beekeeper's keeper.
No, I'm not.
But I'm wondering if I would be if he had a beekeeper, and that's where the philosophical comes from.
Never.
There's nothing that could happen that would put me in that circumstance.
If he had an automated beekeeper, and he gifted it to me, then I think I would be.
All right, now that we've settled that.
Yes, I think you're right.
I'm now going to demonstrate what anxiety looks like because I have not looked at the script before and it is going to throw me due to dyslexia, but here we go.
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All right.
Well, we have a number of things to talk about today.
Shall I start or would you like to start?
Why don't you start?
Okay.
I wanted us to talk a little bit about the experience of and the threat of cancellation.
Okay.
This is, you know, this is a concept that is mocked by many in various venues and of particular political events, largely.
But, you know, we pretty famously got cancelled in 2017 and, you know, much to the irritation of our enemies, emerged in different form, phoenix-like.
We rose from the cancelled.
Into the realm of the... Here we are now.
Yes, here we are now.
Here we are now.
And it took some doing, and it took some time, and there's no guarantees, but of course part of what happened to us was we actually had tenure, which is to say we had the guarantees, and then those guarantees proved not to be any guarantees at all.
And when a mob came at you, Brett, and then me, With irrationality and spurious claims and frankly violence and nonsense and everything in between, instead of standing up, most of our colleagues and basically the entire college administration Coward in a fear.
We had a certain amount of support in private, but not very much in public.
I was on sabbatical at the time, so I didn't have any active students, but your students stood by you and us.
To a person.
To a person.
And that is one of the pieces of that story that has largely been missed.
The idea, like, aren't students crazy?
And wasn't that terrible?
And isn't student culture and isn't that generation just insane?
Well, like, no.
No, that's not the case, because as it turns out, if you're actually an excellent professor who really cares about your students, you develop relationships with them such that when liars come at you and say, you're this, they can say, no, actually, I know this man, and you're not, right?
So yeah, I do want to add something.
The reality is even more stark.
Great.
It's even worse than that?
It's even better than that in this case.
Not only did none of my students defect, which I think is what the protesters were absolutely expecting, is that, you know, you protest a white professor.
On the basis that he's a racist and it doesn't much matter what the reality is, you would expect students to join that protest because it's an of-the-moment thing and not a one-did.
It's inherent to today's logic.
Look at your skin, therefore you're a racist.
We must cure you and you're incurable.
That's how we know you are one, right?
That's the kind of logic But not only did none of my students defect but several of them including a number of students of color courageously stood up and Defended me and were punished specifically for it because that was a bad look for the protesters There were attempts at re-education Yep, there were attempts at re-education, but also the long history of students that we'd had.
None of those people showed up and made crazy claims about racism either, right?
It didn't happen.
And the final piece of that puzzle is that all of the students who did show up, you know, 50 or so students who poured through the door and made these accusations, Never met a single one of them, right?
So the point is it's like absolutely clean that those with experience weren't persuaded by this story.
You had to have exactly zero direct experience in order to be involved in that in the first place.
But of course none of that, you know...
We are lucky That all of those facts emerged right that these protesters were foolish enough to film what they did So that it showed up in public so that we could have that discussion.
So it didn't just look like oh, you know That professor is clearly off and the students have risen up against them and all of that the the lie got put to their Claim but for most people presumably that is not what happens, right?
It doesn't become a famous incident.
And so I Well, and the particular kind of professoring that you did and that I did, in the particular model that only Evergreen afforded, meant that you really had deep relationships with your students, where most college professors don't, in part because they have no interest in it.
Which is unfortunately true for many, but also the standard model of higher ed, the standard model of almost all education now, with some interesting exceptions over in, you know, Waldorf and Montessori space, and a few other experiments in higher ed, but nothing like Evergreen.
The standard model is, you know, I'll see you for 50 minutes three times a week, or maybe an hour and a half two times a week, or something, and if it's a lab class then, you know, you'll have Three hours at a time, but it's probably with a TA.
Probably never going to see the professor.
Maybe he or she will walk through once, right?
And that you can learn some things that way.
What you cannot do is develop community as a class.
It is therefore more difficult, more time-consuming, less predictable.
You can't just set it and go, set it and forget it as the professor, nor can you as the student.
And so, it's more challenging in almost every regard, but it has the potential to be so much more educational, and one of the proofs of that is that when a mob showed up on your doorstep, those people who were in your classroom, which at another school with another professor, might have been eager to jump in with the mob and have that kind of fun, because a lot of people like to be in mobs, or at least they want to be on the side of the majority.
No one bit.
Yeah.
Right.
And that is in part a result of actually the educational model.
Well, and it's even better than that, because in the case of these students, we had had extensive conversations about human evolution, about population versus population competition.
We had talked about race.
We had talked about why racism appears and what we have to do in order to negate its influence.
So it wasn't like anybody had to think about whether or not A claim of racism might mean something because the point is we'd had those discussions and to the extent that there was a charged Discussion it had been diffused because we'd been through it and if there had been any hint of racism They would have detected it and they didn't and so it was like a very quick check.
Oh, that doesn't add up Yeah, so anyway, it is an argument and a strong one For a very intensive model of education.
Mm-hmm.
I would point out Jacob, the beaver researcher and conservationist, is a very good demonstration of what sort of amazing people were in those classrooms.
Absolutely.
So anyway, yeah, it is a model that someone should resurrect because it's awfully good.
We have made some attempts, haven't we?
Yeah.
So far unsuccessfully, but maybe Maybe again, and we also get asked by people, okay, well, where can I send my kids?
It's like, well, as I have said, as I have written about with regard to the University of Austin, for instance, like, yes, the WOC needs to go, but it's not sufficient.
You know, you need a different educational model, which, yes, will be more challenging for the faculty and will take more of their time and attention away from, if they don't really want to be teaching, if they don't really want to be in the classroom or the field or the lab or whatever, with students if that's just a distraction that they feel like that's penance they have to pay before they can get back to their main work which is their research over here then they're not going to be interested in a full-time model of of education like evergreen had
and uh they're not going to be good at if they're forced to it yeah the uh the the hidden aspect of that is full time is a description of one parameter the freedom to make use of that full-time interaction is both the beauty of it and the Achilles heel.
Because you have to be inclined not only to have that kind of intensive teaching relationship, but to figure out what to do with it.
And I think I said on the podcast with Jacob, That the thing, you know, Evergreen gave you total freedom to figure out what to do, but it never figured out what to do with professors who couldn't figure it out.
And that if it had figured out how to keep only those professors who after three years had demonstrated a willingness and a desire to innovate new things with all of that freedom, then it would have been a great place because it would have been filled with people who made use of that to the benefit of their students.
And that the tragedy of what happened at Evergreen is in large measure because it was hit and miss with respect to whether an individual faculty was up to the task or not.
Yeah, too often missed, unfortunately.
So all of that is sort of lead up to 2017 was rough.
That was that, you know, May 23rd, 2017 is when the mob showed up at your door.
That whole academic year, 2016 to 2017, and even before that, but especially that year, it was, it was roiling and it blew up and it was September before we knew for sure that we were not going to be professors anymore.
And it was, you know, it was a full-on reversal of, you know, our entire lives.
Reversal is the wrong word.
An upending.
We went through the looking glass in the language that we started to use, and one of the things that you see after you go through the looking glass is Oh.
Survived.
It's actually interesting over here.
There's some interesting people that I couldn't see before.
And also, when people make false claims at you, when they yell at you that you're a bigot, and you're not because you checked with yourself, and you're self-aware enough and honest enough with yourself to know, and you have friends and family around you who will tell you if you're wrong, you can say, yep, mm-mm, nope.
Not true, right?
And it is also extraordinarily obvious that most of the time it's the people claiming bigot who are in fact the bigots, right?
And that we know.
Most of our audience will already be well familiar with this, but one of, you know, now we will be six years out this year, Yeah, we have now, of course, COVID has happened, and we've had a different kind of run-in with sort of cancellation, this, you know, the demonetization, the shadow banning, that, you know, and the actual banning of some things like the Unity account, but the demonetization by YouTube, all of these things are kinds of cancellation.
But the, like, cancellation by mob using woke language to cow everyone into silence and compliance, I figured we were completely free of.
And I unfortunately in the last few weeks came to see the naivete of that position because what is true is that if you have connections, if there are other people whom you love in the world who are not free in the same way, who have not been pre-cancelled as we have been and are thus immune to that particular thing, Then the mob can come for them because of their association with you.
And this was attempted, and I'm going to speak in kind of vague terms here.
We may speak in more detailed and precise ways later, but for now, for today, we're going to keep it vague.
But I will say that I found myself in the face of a dear friend of mine being at risk of losing, and I'm going to use that crazy plural pronoun just to obscure this person's sex, at risk of losing their job because they insisted that no, they are actually friends with me and I'm an evolutionary biologist.
And I believe that there are two sexes, and only two sexes, and humans, and that you can't switch between them.
It is my purported transphobia, which A, does not mean what they claim it means, and B, if it means anything at all, it means all sorts of things, because what trans is, is all sorts of things, right?
And as we have said over and over and over again, as I have written over and over and over again, I know trans people.
I understand trans to actually be a condition, a condition of being human for very, very, very rare people who actually feel deeply inside of themselves that in order to live their lives as they need to live them, they need to live them as the sex that they are not.
Such people are generally not confused about having actually transitioned sex.
And all the rest of it, which is the vast majority of what is passing for trans and trans rights activism and trans activism in general now, is either misogynistic and regressive to, you know, gender norms of the 50s.
If you like wearing a dress, you must be a woman.
Hmm.
No?
Wrong.
But there are, you know, I could riff on all the ways that trans is and is not represented accurately in modern activism now, but the short version here is that someone
I tried to take my friend out because he is friends with an evolutionary biologist who knows, and I used the word believe before, but who knows that in the human lineage there are two and only two sexes and there have been for at least 500 million years and maybe up to 2 billion years.
And furthermore, and I wrote about this a little bit in my Natural Selections piece this last week, in mammals there are no known cases of functional hermaphrodites or being able to switch between sexes.
And mammals is a really old clade, far older than Chicxulub, 65 million years ago at the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary when, you know, a giant piece of rock hit the earth around the Yucatan and wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs, and then you had the rise of the mammals, but mammals existed before then.
We've got, you know, mammals are very, very old and we don't have any evidence anywhere in mammal history ever of mammals being able to actually switch sex.
Gender is the software.
Gender is the manifest, the behavioral manifestation.
And can you have, you know, men who behave more like typically typical women and vice versa?
Yeah, you can.
And that doesn't change what they are fundamentally.
So, that all is over in some specific territory.
The thing that really grabbed me... There are a couple things to say.
One, yeah, mammals did exist before the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs, but they were oppressed by them.
They were.
It was the Age of Dinosaurs.
I mean, you've seen how we've named it now.
Even mammals named it the Age of Dinosaurs.
Right, it was the Age of Dinosaurs, and now we are in the Age of Mammals because there are only two and a third times as many dinosaur species still on the earth as there are mammals, but never mind that.
We're the ones who do the naming, and so... Yeah, now ostriches don't get to name things, so... No, they do not.
No, it's not going to happen anytime soon.
Ostriches Yeah.
The other thing I want to say is this is actually exactly parallel to my students having known better than to accept the claim that there was some history of racism.
The moment those people streamed through the door, my students knew it was bull, right?
I hear you accused of transphobia, right?
I have seen you I have seen you take care of trans students.
I have seen you fret over the difficulties they run into in the world and the very idea that you're You know what we have is a movement That is actually parasitizing transness, right?
This rare but real phenomenon.
It is parasitizing that in order to gain access to a protected status that then allows it to do things like, you know, win swimming competitions and things like this.
Well, there's, you know, to use biological framing, there's a mimicry.
So parasitizing, yes, for sure.
But it also, it's pretending to be the same thing.
Right?
And in a non-human setting, at the point that the mimic so vastly outnumbers the model, which is to say the true original thing.
The whole system falls apart, right?
Like everyone else who's sort of on the outside observing mimics and models, as it were, can see that it doesn't make any sense and it doesn't work.
The signal doesn't work anymore, right?
And there are some of us out here saying that's not like, no, wrong.
But unfortunately, a good Half-ish of the country who's thinking about this at all is compelled by these talking points and all they have to do is go transphobe and the obvious discrepancies and damage being done, especially to children, by this ideology just disappears because people are scared of being called names.
And you were remarkably not scared of being called racist, because you had already investigated very carefully and thought and knew, no, not true.
I similarly am not scared of being called a transphobe, because A, the word isn't meaningful in the same way that racist at least used to be meaningful, but to the degree that it means in the very narrow sense, no, not true.
However, I did find myself Wavering in this situation in a way I never did.
Because they took a hostage.
Because they took a hostage.
But look, this is a really important point.
When they came at you, and then very quickly they came at us, but even if I had somehow remained invisible to the mob that came for you, we were in it together.
We've been in it together from the beginning.
I vetted and edited and okayed everything you said out to those crazy people in advance, fighting against the ideology, right?
We were in it together, whether or not they knew that.
I assume and hope that you never doubted that I would say, can we just give in?
That was never an option.
Never entered my mind.
Never an option for me and I assume that you knew that and you did.
But it's not my right to expect someone else whom I love but isn't my life partner.
To stand strong when they could say, yeah, you know what?
I do disagree with her.
Yeah, maybe not my friend, right?
It would have been easy for this person.
And in fact, because they are who they are, it wasn't going to happen.
And they didn't want me to do that and they wanted us to be working together to figure out what to do with me knowing for sure that that wasn't going to happen.
But it was harder for me to have the certainty because I felt like something about me has dragged you into this.
The mob took a hostage.
This makes it so much more challenging, actually.
Alright, two points.
One, I want to make sure to come back to this because this puts the shoe on exactly the other foot for me on an issue where I have been clear and I'm probably in error.
So I'd like to come back to that.
But I want to talk about the confidence when the mob shows up, right?
Where does the confidence that the accusation has no merit and therefore does not require, you know, hand-wringing or, you know, extensive contemplation.
That comes from somewhere.
Yeah.
And I think it can only be one place.
Which is that you have already done the contemplation.
If you're trying to think this through as the mob is accusing you of things, right?
They can confuse you.
They can sway you, perhaps.
And, you know, your instincts as a good person, like, well, wait a second.
It's not my right to shut somebody down who thinks I've got a moral defect.
It's my obligation to investigate that.
I need to listen to criticism.
That thing will be weaponized against you.
And so the point is, look, when those students were accusing me of racism, there is a reason that I had exactly no concern about this.
And it's because This has never been a charged issue.
It wasn't a charged issue in my family.
We talked openly about it.
We dealt with the difficulties.
And so, to whatever extent, I might have a misunderstanding, and I'm sure that I do.
It wasn't the result of a moral defect.
It wasn't the result of me rooting for one group against another.
And in fact, I was very clear on, you know, what I did think about this issue, right?
What I thought the unfortunate features of the system were what I thought the places that humanity was lucky because where race could be a worse issue The the biology that underlies this is much less horrible than it might be but in any case it is the The navigation in advance, right?
That is why you also have no fear on the issue of transphobia, right?
Because you've done this work in advance over the course of years with different real live people.
It's not a theoretical question for you.
This is the problem though.
What the mob is doing, one of the many things the mob is doing, It is making it impossible to have a discussion in which you figure out what you think and why.
Right?
It is making it impossible for us to present evidence.
You know, it comes up with arbitrary rules.
Like, you're not a one of those, so you're not allowed to talk about those.
Right, right.
And if that's a rule, then the point is, well, how do you... How will I learn?
How do I... That's not my job to teach you.
Well, how about I learn on my own?
No, you're not allowed to think about those things, because you're not one of those.
Right.
And, you know, You can't make a joke about this.
Okay?
I can't make a joke about this because it will make people feel unsafe and not being safe is bad and you know so okay now there's a rule against making a joke well but the problem is jokes even jokes that go too far right of which there are many many jokes even jokes that go too far help us figure out where too far is and why it's there right what makes a joke funny involves figuring out where that line is right Without humor, the line still exists, but no one can point to it.
Right, and the fact is, you know, there are trans people.
I gotta say, it's an odd phenomenon, right?
It's an interesting phenomenon.
It would be shocking if there was nothing funny about it.
Right?
It would be utterly shocking, right?
We can say the same thing about homosexuality.
Frankly, we can say the same thing about races and the various arbitrary differences between us, right?
These are all grounds for humor, and humor is... And the differences between men and women.
Of course.
Right.
All of these things.
And so the point is, it's no accident that the point is you're not one of those, you can't talk about it, and you sure as hell can't make a joke, right?
Because if you, you know, if you could make jokes, then you could figure out Where you stood and why and then you'd be immune when they came through the door And so it's all kind of a matter of frustrating any normal process that would protect you So that you're vulnerable and then can be manipulated to be absorbed into the mob and to go after the next person Which is why this thing is contagious and dangerous is that it it picks people up
Well, it picks people up whom it has already made as ignorant and confused as possible so that they are least likely to be able to defend themselves against techniques that are authoritarian and mean and frankly bigoted.
And part of what they do They take all of their characters, which include being authoritarian and mean-spirited and bigoted, and they accuse you of being those things.
Of course, whenever you deny a thing, forever after, there is an association with people who maybe don't know you very well.
It's like, oh, wasn't she the one who denied the thing?
Right?
Yeah, there is a lot of bigotry in society still.
And some of the traditional kinds of bigotry do exist.
It was waning fast.
Yeah.
That was waning fast.
And what we have now is on, you know, on the side of the political spectrum that we used to be unabashedly on without any suggestion that we might maybe not really belong on the left.
Like, that's at least how I felt, right?
For my entire life.
It is that side now that is embracing bigotry.
That is embracing name-calling, and cancellation, and threats, and authoritarianism, and it's doing so in the name of love.
And it's a lie.
Like, some of them are confused themselves and some of them know that they're full of it, but it's wrong regardless of how they get there.
And, you know, enough with the fake, you know, love-above-all stuff from the people who are acting in exactly the opposite way.
Like, there are a lot of very loving people out there who don't look like what these mobs want them to look like.
And frankly, the feelings of the people and the mobs cannot continue to describe for us what it is that we're allowed to do and say in the world.
So, a couple things before we get to the second point where the shoe is now on the other foot for me.
Oh, yeah.
One, I was doing a little thinking, you know.
I think you were doing a lot of thinking.
Yeah, I have been doing a lot of thinking recently.
Before.
Yeah.
But, okay, so you and I agree, bigotry was waning fast and was not all that common.
Right?
Now the problem is you can hear, as you say that into a microphone, you can hear the pearl clutching and the fainting couch reaching and the hand wringing and the consternation and the calls to have meetings to discuss the, you know, problem of people who are so dumb they don't see how much bigotry there is everywhere.
I think we could solve these problems with more meetings.
Oh, definitely meetings.
Yeah, and email is not going to cover it.
No, no, no, in-person meetings.
Oh, maybe Zoom meetings.
Zoom meetings.
Sitting in the same room.
Right.
But still done by Zoom.
Right, because then you can turn off your camera if you're snickering at how foolish the other people are being and listening to your bullshit.
Sorry, I...
I am.
I delayed you.
I distracted you.
You derailed me.
That's the D word I was looking for.
Yes.
Which is a kind of violence.
Derailing.
I am not sorry.
Weird.
Okay.
No remorse.
Red flag.
You know what it is?
No apologies for things I didn't do.
Really?
I know.
Is that your rule?
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
That seems somehow morally compromised in some way.
I'll have to pencil out later.
Yeah, but there I was derailing you again, for which I will apologize.
You re-derailed me.
Yeah.
Yes.
D squared railed me.
I don't know, but... Yeah, so far the math derailments are not going well for us today.
This is not a good math morning, but yeah.
But the gist, the gist is right.
So, in any case, here's what I've been realizing.
And you know, you spelled it out, okay?
Bigotry was rapidly disappearing from the landscape.
To the point that when Jeremy Lee Quinn and I were talking on our program... Remind our audience.
He's a freelance journalist who has been in all of the hot spots, including January 6th.
Lefty.
Anarchist.
But anyway, a very good journalist.
Was there on January 6th actually.
Went into the Capitol and observed it first hand.
Anyway, interesting guy.
And he was describing, I think he was actually describing January 6th to me when I interviewed him.
And he told me with some excitement that he had actually met a racist.
Like a guy who was just admitting it and talking about, yeah, he didn't dig other races and all of this.
And I was excited, too, because neither of us had ever met one of these people in the wild, right?
They're very rare.
And was he in a cage or did you get to touch him?
Right, it was remarkable.
He even had a sign.
You could just find him in the crowd based on his sign.
I'm a racist.
Pretty much, something to that effect.
Yeah, and so, you know, there is something a little bit, I don't know, quaint about that, that somebody is so off.
It's a living dodo bird.
Right, he's a living dodo.
But anyway, so they are rare, but then you can hear the pearl clutching and Fainting couch reaching and all of the stuff that people do because of course they know from personal experience Just how much of this stuff is out there?
No, you don't what what is out there still in large quantities is ignorance Absolutely, which is not the same thing as bigotry.
Yep Right?
So anyway, we've been making that distinction for a long time.
There's lots of ignorance.
You and I have plenty of ignorance, too.
As does everybody else.
But I'm not saying... There's nothing to the accusation that I'm a racist.
But yeah, I've got ignorance.
And, you know, I didn't grow up in anybody else's home.
I didn't grow up in anyone else's culture.
It's simply that.
But, then you make the next point.
Which is, actually though, racism is common.
It's just back.
That's what it is.
It's a new kind.
It's some sort of neo-bigotry.
Right, and I think that's the sticking point, is that now the racists look very different from what they once did.
You know, it's not that retro dude at the January 6th protest.
It's some kind of new racism where the focuses are different, but nonetheless it's, you know, this obsession With race, right?
Which de-individuates people and exposes people to, you know, again, it's, you know, it doesn't matter that you think you're doing it because you want to be good.
The point is, no, you're separating us by race again and you're taking away the thing that's key to being human and substituting something, you know, grotesque that doesn't, you know, not only... And superficial.
Relatively superficial.
And there's no way it could possibly work.
So actually, I did have a thought about how to deal with these.
Again, I imagine you had many.
I had a few, but I thought this one was good.
We'll see.
So the idea is how do you deal with these new racists, right?
And so what I was thinking is You just carry around with you, for the moment that you need it, some saltines in a little packet.
And then when you encounter one of these white folks that is now newly obsessed with race, you just say, Cracker?
My feeling is that that would be, it's at least a conversation starter.
You at least might get a few gaskets blown.
They might blow a gasket.
Human gaskets.
Right, exactly.
No, they could start blowing.
I don't know where we have our gaskets actually.
Human gaskets?
Oh, the blood-brain barrier.
I think that's the one.
That's probably it.
So COVID might have caused some gasket blowing.
A little gasket blowing, yeah.
And some haphazard repairs.
All right, so you also wanted to go somewhere else.
The shoe-on-the-other-foot thing.
Since we ended up in the public eye as a result of the unfortunate thing that happened at Evergreen to me and then to us, people have come to me regularly and they have basically said I'm in a terrible situation.
It's happening to me.
What should I do?
And it is clear that when somebody comes to me, they pretty much want to hear me say, okay, here's how you stand up to that.
And I'm very reluctant to do this.
Right.
Especially if it's not someone you know, right.
And you don't know anything about all of their circumstances.
Right.
Because what I know is that you and I landed on our feet and we landed on our feet for lots of different reasons.
We had a good support network, we did lose a bunch of friends, but there was enough there to escape the implosion of Evergreen and to make our way in the world in a different manner.
I don't know that for anybody else.
And if somebody stands up to the mob because it's the right thing to do and they lose their job and their family is imperiled or worse because of that catastrophe Then I don't want to be the one to say, yeah, it's cool to stand up to the mob, because as much as I think it's important that we stand up to mobs, it's not all, you know, look, if we hadn't landed on our feet, we at least have family, right?
We have family and it would have protected our children.
Not everybody's in that spot.
So anyway, I've been very reluctant to give the advice that I know people want me to give.
And other heterodox folks have often confronted me over this.
Like, why won't you tell them what they want to hear?
We need people to stand up.
That's how we're going to defeat this thing.
If they're coming to you, you know what they want to hear.
Right.
And I agree.
We do need them to stand up.
But I still... It's my moral responsibility not to give somebody advice that would be good for me, but potentially bad for them in their situation.
Right?
So anyway, I have Failed to deliver the advice that I know is probably for the global best.
Because it is interpersonally not fair to expose somebody to that.
But this is the situation that you have found yourself in here.
Where somebody that you care very much about was taken as a hostage by a mob that had some power to do harm.
And I see you going through exactly The various machinations over, you know, the responsibility of, oh my god, I put this person in peril, right?
And I will feel terrible if this... By knowing that there are two sexes.
Right, by doing your job.
Right.
But yes, and I said to them at some point, sort of in the middle of this, I don't think this is what you were thinking of doing.
I don't think you want to do it.
I don't think this is what you want to hear from me.
This is mostly about me relieving pressure on myself.
I need you to know that it's okay if you disavow me.
Yeah.
And they didn't.
Of course.
They wouldn't.
It was never a possibility.
But I just felt such It's no longer just about me.
This is so fundamentally the human condition, right?
And I didn't see this coming exactly because we went through this together, and so I felt I knew, and we had students, and there were effects on students, and we were navigating all of that in real time.
I just, I didn't see this coming where I felt both responsible to, while knowing that I was in no way responsible for the situation.
Responsible to the person.
Making sure that they wouldn't feel, that they didn't feel obligated to a sense to me to do something that was going to imperil Lots of things.
While also knowing, as did they, as does everyone who can see this with any clarity, like I'm not responsible for this thing.
This is about the bigoted mob on the other side wielding power.
Yep.
With some wiggle room over individual cases where somebody truly has extreme jeopardy, I'm now seeing the situation differently because I'm watching you make the arguments that I would make and I'm watching you feel the responsibility that I would feel and I feel very differently from the outside.
And I think the key thing is, A, we know how this dynamic works.
It's not like the first time anybody's seen this kind of mob.
We've seen this mob hundreds of times, right?
In many different contexts.
It's always the same, right?
You apologize to it.
Does it get placated?
No.
Quite the opposite.
You give them an inch.
Right.
They take it all.
Second thing is it is a contagious game theoretic object, right?
Its purpose is to get you to back down so that it will move on to the next person.
And the point is by backing down you fuel it.
So in one sense, you know, you've got a person who is confronted with an unfortunate mob, right?
That person is in peril and the instinct is, oh my goodness, to the extent that I'm responsible for you being confronted by a mob, I feel absolutely obligated to do everything I can to get you out from in front of that mob.
However, if you do that, the mob comes for somebody else.
Right?
And destroys all the good things.
Right, along the way.
And so in some sense we're dealing, you know, it's 2023, right?
This happened to us in 2017.
We did stand strong and we demonstrated how that could be done and we were lucky to be in a position where we were comparatively well situated to do it.
But We needed more people to do it in order that it wouldn't still be going on in 2023.
Yeah.
And so in some sense, I'm now looking back at the people who I was reluctant to say, no, actually you really do have to stand up.
People who, as you point out, came to me because that's what they wanted to hear.
And given that they came to me and that's what they wanted to hear, I probably should have said it.
Oh, interesting.
That's what I think.
Okay.
Good.
Okay.
New topic.
I think.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There's so many different things to talk about here.
Do you want to go or do you want me to pick another topic from my little list?
I know you've got two big things that you want to talk about.
Yeah.
I can segue here if you like.
Why don't you continue on?
We'll pick up the other two afterwards.
Okay.
I was, for my Natural Selections piece this week, which was broadly on... Hold on.
I just gotta make sure this works.
Yes.
Don't show my screen yet, Zach, but I'm about to ask you to.
My Natural Selections this week was broadly on dominance hierarchies.
I had tweeted something a month ago, a month and a half ago, responding to sort of a naive understanding of what an alpha male is, and then we also got asked a question about it in our Q&A last week, and I was thinking about Humans don't really have alpha males, and a lot of people think alpha male is not a thing at all, and that's not exactly true, but it is kind of an archaic term.
It's not really what's used much in animal behavior anymore.
But there are a lot of reasons to expect that humans don't behave like, say, gorillas.
But also, we have, well, you can read the piece.
I did not mean to embark on a question of what an alpha male is, but everyone will have something that comes up in their mind when they think alpha male.
So I wrote this piece, and I needed a picture to go out with social media when it went out.
And so I looked on Getty, Getty Images.
And you may now show my screen, Zach.
We've just put Getty Images across all of these so there's no copyright risk.
I'm just gonna, I just screenshotted the top images when I do alpha male and I will describe them for those of you just listening.
We've got a virus being injected with a With a needle.
We've got a guy in a plague mask from the Middle Ages.
We've got a close-up of a researcher in a hazmat suit and a mask and some kind of a vial.
Hands.
Dude in a mask with a syringe.
A hand with a syringe.
A biohazard bag.
A guy sitting alone in bamboo.
I don't even know, how do I describe that?
A dorky looking guy flexing his muscles.
Yeah, looking angry.
And that was the point of this thing that I wrote.
It's like, actually it's not about anger and violence, it's about conciliation.
Anyway.
On and on and on and on.
I'm not going to describe all of them, but almost all of these are like blue suited, white suited, you know, masked people with syringes.
Or phones or syringes on all masks and this like this is this is what Getty gives up when you say I'm looking for pictures of an alpha male.
Finally at the at at the very end of what I'm going to show you here then we have just like three pictures of randomly happy people most of whom aren't men masked most of whom aren't men at all and then a kangaroo which like as far as I can tell it's the first possible alpha male I've seen here right this kangaroo.
Yes I mean in fact the uh And maybe it's I don't even know.
I can't sex a kangaroo at this distance.
Maybe that's even a female.
I don't know.
It's not worth delving too deeply here, but it's possible that in that cluster of four images, Three of those images appear to be of the same scene where the dude is standing like he's a college student standing next to two female college students.
No, it is.
Yeah, one of them has changed their shirt in one of them, but no, it is.
You're right.
Yeah, so anyway, it's possible that that's what they're getting at, but there is something very odd here.
Now, when you showed me this, I thought, Something is wrong with this and I'm just like it may be just even algorithmically broken and I wondered if you know it wasn't bringing up all of these COVID images which would be more at home in a search if you searched Pandemic or COVID you would expect those images But so I did a test and I searched for alpha Mm-hmm Just to see if it was talking about a variant if that's why it was triggered.
Nope didn't happen So anyway, it is the alpha male search and male doesn't do it either, right?
Yeah, so there's something about those combination of terms that is triggering, you know, maybe it's just algorithmic But anyway, it's There's very much a question about what's going on here.
Does our producer want to say something?
Yeah, that's not our experience at all when we checked.
It was not the same images, but it was also lots of COVID images when we started out.
Unfortunately, so Zach and I are having a disagreement.
Do you want me to, I don't know, do you want me to talk into the mic?
You could talk into the mic.
I think We can't show you the images because of the way Getty works, and we would be putting ourselves in jeopardy if we showed those images without... Without putting Getty across.
So just to clarify what I just said, my sense when we searched up alpha was not the same images, but related COVID images.
No, that is correct.
What we saw for alpha variant at least... No, no, no, it was just alpha.
I just plugged in alpha.
So we saw a lot of images that were like pictures of a virus, but not pictures of people with syringes.
It was definitely odd.
The alpha male search was particularly weird.
And I also searched interestingly, if you plug in beta male, it's identical.
The search is like identical to alpha male, which is weird.
Yeah, so I don't know, and I've got one more set of images to show as well.
Again, I was just looking for an image for this piece, and I've tried gender norms.
Now, before we show this one, don't show my screen just yet, Zach, I will say that I did this search back, it would have been Monday night, and when you guys redid this search just now, it came up with totally different answers.
So again, again and again and again, I have to wonder, and we should all be wondering, to what degree am I seeing what other people see?
To what degree is a search a search?
And I thought, we have purchased access to Getty to use professionally, and I would have thought that a search would be a search.
And you would expect it to change over time as new pictures get added, as the cultural milieu changes, whatever milieu.
But alpha male and gender norm, which is the other search that I did here, would seem to have nothing to do with COVID.
And so if you search on alpha male, what you get is a whole bunch of pictures of COVID-y syringey things.
It's very, very, very odd.
And then what we see, if you want to show my screen now, Zach, when I searched on gender norm, and again this was not replicated today, five days later, is what appears to be pictures from China, maybe, of people being given throat swabs.
Just over and over and over and over again.
Yep, it's amazing.
For the search on gender norm and then we end up at baseball.
So I'm just baffled and continue to be, you know, concerned in places.
Like the evidence for concern shows up in places I was not expecting it at all, right?
So as you will recall, years ago When we were professors and creating lectures the typical thing you did yours differently than I did but in general there was a sort of sense that we would build a lecture in PowerPoint and then deliver it in one way or another in front of the class and I became Pretty adamant.
This is long before anybody had confronted us over anything.
But I didn't like the idea that when I gave a lecture and I was going to talk about the evolution of love or something, right, that if you plug, if you Search for a random image.
What you tend to find are images of well-heeled white people in the Western world in love on a beach or whatever, right?
So I used to have to trick the search engine into giving me images.
You know, if you plug love into a search engine, why are you not likely to come up with hunter-gatherers in some place on Earth?
Fewer pictures, for one thing.
And it's less often what people think they're looking for, but of course that reinforces what they think they're looking for.
Right, but okay, at the very least there should be a wide range of images from different cultures, since every culture has this feature, right?
It should not be heavily biased in some direction, and so I used to have to counteract the heavy bias inside of Google, and at one point I was talking to my students about the fact that I was doing this, And they clued me into the fact that actually Google was sensitive to where you were searching from and that if you tricked it into where it thought you were you got a different bias.
So anyway there's some long-standing thing and there's a genuine problem.
How do you solve the problem of delivering images that are representative rather than reflective of a bias in the population that's likely to be searching or the expectations or desires of those who are searching?
You want a search engine to give you an actual reflection of the world rather than to reinforce biases.
But as soon as you start trying to correct for biases, then the point is you're in danger of introducing biases.
And anyway, it's a difficult problem.
Zach has something to add.
I just need to correct something that I told you that was incorrect, which Dad and I tried to find out.
When I just saw what you showed, it turns out that when I tried to replicate your search for gender norm, I was using the wrong category.
You know what I mean, Mom.
But anyway, I just replicated it.
It's identical, so that's actually hasn't changed.
Okay, so both of these searches do replicate now.
So they're identical if I search them now compared to when you searched them a few days ago, so that's not a data point there.
Interesting.
Yeah.
So I don't honestly know what it means.
I don't see how this functions to anyone's benefit, honestly.
With regard to gender norms and thread swabs, I can't get anywhere with it.
With regard to alpha males and people being masked and getting syringes poked at them, I can see how this is consistent with a narrative that we are being asked to agree to, which is that you're not doing your duty and maybe you're not being a good man if you don't do the thing that the government is asking you to do.
Well, I have a hypothesis that is simultaneously worse and maybe less targeted.
So, I know from what little I've done Getty image searches that there are places where it just doesn't have anything, right?
Because it's actually buying access to these photos.
It doesn't, you know, things that get particularly Right, but someone at Getty tags them.
I could see taking a lot of pictures.
The picture that I ended up using, which was from a search on Alpha Male, and I'm going to just keep talking so I can find it here, was presumably, my guess is, that This person who took this picture, you can show it now, Zach, did not take it and think, ah, that's a picture of an alpha male.
But it got tagged this way.
And I looked at it and went, cold finches, a feeder.
Yeah, there's like the one guy that's looking at the bird coming in.
That's a territorial interaction at least.
Yeah.
Right.
So I know I interrupted you, but I don't.
Yes, there are certainly arenas where there aren't very many pictures.
But someone within each of, you know, Flickr within each of these places that is distributing pictures is deciding how to tag photos.
Right, but remember my claim was that My hypothesis would be both better and worse.
So the idea is you have a repository that isn't a collect everything and let some AI tag it.
It's more deliberate and more selective than that.
It's good images.
They are manually tagged and so it's a much smaller pool.
Which means that if you search things that nobody ever searches, the search doesn't have anything for you, right?
Getty doesn't know that it should be looking for pictures of gender norms, right?
Maybe that's not a very common search.
As a matter of fact, it probably isn't a very common search.
Likewise, alpha male, you know, maybe.
So imagine the following.
Imagine that there is a nudge in the search that biases every search a little bit.
So it just puts in a smattering of this, here's what people are doing, you know, they're getting jabbed, they're taking swabs, they're doing this stuff.
And that when the algorithm comes up empty, because you've thrown it a challenge it's not good at, the only thing there is the nudge.
And so the point is it spits out a bunch of stuff that has nothing to do with your search.
It has to do with the fact that there's a very subtle nudge built in to the algorithm.
In the absence of any other data, that nudge becomes much larger than life.
Right.
And it's a testable hypothesis, of course, because once you know that there's going to be empty categories, we could go search some things that we expect to be pretty empty and see whether we get the nudge, right, in the direction of everything.
Yeah.
Oh, that's good.
I mean, it's terrible, but it's... See?
I told you.
Both better and worse.
Yeah, indeed.
So I'm going to save one of the things I was going to talk about for next week, and I got one little tiny thing to maybe add at the end, or I can add it here, or... No, you'll add it at the end.
Okay.
The first thing that I want to talk about of my two topics here is on my mind because of an essay that was just published by a good friend of ours.
Holly Mathnerd is her gnome de plume.
It's here on my screen if you want to show it, Zach.
Yeah, you want to put it up?
It's called Next Step in the War on Kids.
Next step in the war on kids and I'm not telling any tales out of school to say that Holly is somebody who had an absolutely horrifying childhood and she has written about it, written about the abuse that she faced and her
struggles in dealing with it and basically, you know, she's an amazingly capable person who has You know, she's in some ways self-constructed in a way that most of us just simply aren't right because she had to you know break the programs that she got from her traumatic childhood and replace them with better stuff, which is a Difficult process in any case she has been Very
sensitive to and I think prescient about a march towards the normalization of pedophilia that is clearly occurring.
And anyway, her new essay is about a Next step in that march towards the normalizing of pedophilia in society Which I had never even heard of until she alerted me to it and what it has to do with is a New term now many people will be at some level familiar with a term called
That recently emerged, which is minor attracted persons, which is basically an antiseptic sounding legitimizing term that substitutes for pedophile, right?
So if you were going to normalize this, pedophile of course sets people on edge.
As it should.
And the idea is, in a world where people are obsessed with the idea that you shouldn't shame anybody for any kink they might have, then the idea is this sort of swaps this terrible thing in under the radar by describing it like any other sexual proclivity. then the idea is this sort of swaps this terrible Sexual proclivity, right?
So that's bad enough and we've many of us have seen this trend and understood the hazard in it But then there's sort of a next phase and the new phase involves another term again I've never heard it before which I think is adult attracted minor and This one Even I mean basically even more it's even more evil right because you know the natural discussion about
wait a minute minor attracted person Why did we stop saying pedophile? is not Brought forth by this term because now the focus is on the you know sexual desires of children and And it does strike me as absolutely diabolical and that there need to be a certain number of things just simply on the table so that people aren't caught off guard by this term and induced to normalize it.
Because really we have to reject terms like this.
Let me just read one sentence from her piece before you get to your main point here.
Again, it's called Next Step in the War on Kids, and she writes, Right.
Just as there are now millions of children who believe that you can't differentiate a man from a woman without asking, the notion that you can't tell a child from an adult without asking is their specific and intentional goal here.
Right.
And by blurring this distinction, they are legitimizing behavior that, in my opinion, ought to be at the very top of our list of things that we defend against.
Now, I don't want to globalize too much.
I will say in the last Five years.
I believe we have seen an epidemic of our failure to protect children from harm, and you see it across all sorts of domains, right?
what we did over COVID vaccinating children who weren't vulnerable to the disease with a highly novel inoculant was unconscionable, right?
Even if there was no evidence of harm, there was no reason to expose them to something novel and novel stuff hurts people.
And so why would you even take that risk?
And it was even worse than that because we did know, or some people knew that there were harms that were done.
So anyway, my argument is going to be these things are part and parcel of each other.
Now, of course, the failure to protect children extends into other domains that go back much farther, right?
People will have seen my two conversations with Mike Mew, and they will know that by Mike Mew's model, which I am all but certain is correct evolutionarily, we are allowing facial structure in children who have yet to be harmed to be degraded we are allowing facial structure in children who have yet to be harmed to be degraded by giving them diets that do not create the proper feedbacks and that it isn't just malocclusion, the failure of the teeth to meet properly that is caused by this, but with Mike Mu, and they will know that by Mike Mu's model, which I am all but certain is correct evolutionarily, we are allowing facial structure in children who have yet to be harmed to be degraded by giving them diets that do not create the proper feedbacks,
and that it isn't just malocclusion, the failure of the teeth to meet properly, that is and that it isn't just malocclusion, the failure of the teeth to meet properly, that is caused by this, but it is many other pathologies, right, the sicknesses that people have, allergies that they have, sleep apnea, right, potentially attention deficit disorder, all sorts of pathologies right, potentially attention deficit disorder, all sorts of pathologies that we, to the extent that Mike Mew is right, which again I think is he's almost certain to be mostly right, we are,
we haven't yet harmed people in the future, right, there may, we we haven't yet harmed people in the future, right, there may, we may have to deal symptomatically with people who have already had this problem, but you know anybody who hasn't been born yet could be saved from it and we're not protecting those future from this problem.
So there's some epidemic of failure to protect children and the harms are not small, right?
It is not a minor matter that you get an injection that causes myocarditis, right?
That is a life-shortening disability.
The toying with the Breaching of the taboo against pedophilia is going to expose children to what is effectively a psychological maiming.
Right?
That is the thing.
And so...
First thing, I wanted to point out what the trick is.
And it's a trick, we've already talked about it a little bit today in a different context.
But the trick is to get people on board with some strategic change that is desired by some group that is advocating for something it should not advocate for.
But to get people who don't have a dog in the fight on board by... People who just want to do the right thing.
Right, people who want to do the right thing.
Well, how do you do this?
You create the impression that somebody is a victim, and that their victim status has to be your focus.
We have to actively challenge the victim status.
And in the case of this adult attracted minor, The victim is a child who you are oppressing by blocking their sexual attraction to an adult.
Now, A, this is sophistry to the nth degree.
It's demonic sophistry.
It's demonic sophistry, but the point is it's obviously Just garbage.
And the idea that one feels an obligation to marshal a counter-argument is already wrong, right?
This is insane.
And I want to explain why it's insane.
Even if you took all of the arguments that are made in favor of a shift like this and you said, there's truth in it.
I'm not saying there is, but let's say there was.
Right?
You still cannot be certain.
That the change you are contemplating is not going to do massive harm to many, many children who have yet to be harmed by this.
In other words, the precautionary principle, even taken at its lightest measure, still requires you to forbid us to play with this boundary, right?
So that you do not end up maiming children who have yet to be, in this case, psychologically maimed by such an interaction.
Right?
Even if you thought the argument was right, it's still not so certain to be right that you can afford to play with this definition.
Okay, so that is me granting way more than I should.
Even if the argument was right, it's still dead on arrival in any decent society that understands that its top obligation has to be to protect children from harm that hasn't happened to them yet, right?
That should be our top priority.
And the fact that we keep falling down on that obligation across different domains ought to have us on high alert.
We are screwing this up and we have no right to screw it up.
This, you know, a society that fails at this will fail.
Period.
Right?
You don't protect the young, you're cooked.
So, okay.
Now, let me step back and talk about this actual claim.
Right?
Because I think, um, you know, it couldn't be more ludicrous.
I mean, again, I'm gonna jump in and say I don't like sophistry, ludicrous.
It's grotesque.
It's evil.
It's demonic.
It's demonic, as I also said.
Go on.
I just, I object to words like ludicrous here.
It's not, it's nowhere close.
I agree with you.
Now as an evolutionary biologist I will say I try very hard to avoid claims that something is evil because I know that evil is a bad strategy.
If we take amorality to be the absence of morality and evil to be the desire to do harm, Evil is rare because you don't get ahead by doing it.
This is rare.
This is a bad strategy.
I agree with you.
If ever there was a place where we should invoke terms of evil, this is it.
So the normal caution about invoking that too easily does not belong here.
This is a place where that does belong.
All right, but I wanted to talk about just the basics of the claim and point out how insane this is.
I mean, A, it's a little hard to know what normal childhood looks like in this regard because... You mean anymore?
No, at all.
Right?
Because what we're talking about is who children are sexually attracted to.
A, we're not supposed to talk to them about it.
B, it tends to be lost in memory because the point is it just, it's a topic that is, um, we lack information.
Right?
Now... Well, but, I mean, didn't, isn't that, I feel like that's missing the point.
It depends on how old we're talking about, but I thought the more basic point is children aren't sexual.
But this is the problem.
I don't think that that's the case.
I think that it is inevitable, given what a human being is and how a human being is programmed to be successful as a human being, that all of the programs that eventually have an adult manifestation have that all of the programs that eventually have an adult manifestation have a prototype version in children that then Okay?
And so I will just, this is weird, but you know, I believe, as far as I know, I am a normal human male, right?
The evidence for this is actually pretty good, okay?
You and I have been together for decades, right?
We've been married since 1998, but we've been together for decades.
We have two well-adjusted children.
We have not gotten exasperated at each other and gotten divorced, right?
Well, the first, but not the second.
Right.
Yeah, that was a... Yeah, I needed parentheses to unite those two things.
The exasperation we have felt to each other has not produced a divorce, right?
And so anyway, all of those indications are...
I think pretty strong that I am not unusual in my adult human maleness, right?
It's quite a setup.
I know, it's quite a setup.
Well, I did a little back-of-the-envelope calculation.
More math?
It's not going to be more math, is it?
No, it is more math.
Oh, boy.
Because the math is not going so well today.
No, I think you'll like this.
I think you will validate that the math is excellent.
Okay, here we go.
This is potentially an argument for how I might be a little unusual.
Oh, you're a little unusual.
I have, if my calculations are correct, been male for something like 20,000 consecutive days.
Not a single day of being female anywhere in that streak.
You didn't wake up and were like, maybe I'm 40% female today.
Never?
Never once.
20,000 consecutive days.
Alright, so that's kind of amazing.
That's quite a streak.
Okay, but other than that... You got quite a streak going there.
Boy, it's gotta be a record.
I mean, right?
It's said of the guy who works on Lifespan.
I feel that it should be a writer.
Do you?
Yes, I do.
That's further evidence that you're male.
Right!
That's what I'm saying.
Yes, quite male.
But here's the thing.
Don't I do not know how normal my Sexual development was okay, but I do remember as a very young person like probably five or six right I remember Uh, being attracted to, you know, twenty-somethings, you know.
A teacher.
A babysitter who was particularly nice looking and kind or whatever.
I remember an attraction and I know for sure it was a sexual attraction.
But it was vague.
Completely vague.
I had no idea what that was even about.
I had no concept.
It was just like, you know, desire of some kind.
Right?
I don't know how normal that is.
I don't know if the distinction is between males and females.
It may be that females don't normally feel that at that age and males do.
But it's not shocking that it would be Well, we have a word that we have, which I think you just used as well, is crush.
We do know, we do recognize that children experience these fits of intrigue and focus.
Well, but I'm not even sure it just isn't a building block that was necessary.
You have to go through the abstract desire before you desire something.
And, you know, because we're humans and we're not pre-programmed, you know, in any specific way, we are, you know, we build up that over time.
And presumably the information that we have access to fills in details.
And frankly this is a very good reason not to have this information.
You know, circulating around where kids who shouldn't be encountering this stuff are seeing it on the internet or whatever, right?
So anyway, my point is, I think my development was normal.
I don't know that for sure.
I don't know that normal means normal for any kid or if it's normal for boys and not for girls.
I don't know.
But my point is, The fact that I was attracted to sympathetic, nice-looking girls at that age... Young women.
Young women.
Women, you know, not incidentally... You just have to be careful with the language because of what you're trying to communicate.
I agree, but I mean, you know, and the problem is you get to our age and you, you know, look back at, you know, young people and you... We don't have really good terms for this.
Young woman is about as good as we can do here, but the point is it is not surprising given all that we know scientifically, right?
There's a reason that beauty is concentrated at the moment at which adulthood begins, right?
There's a reason for that and that has to do with the fact that the amount of a woman's reproductive life that is ahead of her is maximal at that moment while she is capable of producing offspring.
Not surprising that boys should be focused on women that age at any age, right?
Because the point is that it's about something else.
Yeah, I mean, I don't think I really want to spend time here, but I don't know that that argument makes sense if you're talking about a five-year-old.
No, I think it makes sense because the point is the five-year-old is going to keep building up some model of what sexuality is until it's actually plausible to interact, and the point is it doesn't make sense to keep... I mean, look, I had crushes on girls my age, but...
That vague attraction, that I didn't know what it was at the time, was focused on something else.
It was, you know, frankly it's about sex, it's about reproduction, and so not terribly surprising that it would have that focus.
And anyway, my only point is, there is no argument in the world that those desires, vague as they are in a normal child at that age, should be met with reality.
That's not what they're for, right?
In which case, I see now where you've gone, in which case this is precisely analogous to the child who wakes up and says, I am Batman, should not be taken seriously.
You might indulge him his fantasy for the day.
You might let him go to school dressed as Batman.
Yep.
The child who wakes up and who is a boy and says, I am a girl, should not be taken as reality.
Yep.
And the child who has such a feeling towards an adult probably doesn't announce it.
Right.
So, you know, it's different and then this is probably not something that becomes public.
But is part of a fantasy scape of development which is about the child Progressing towards adulthood and which should not interface in any way.
Must not.
Must not interface in any way with the adult world, adults and their behavior, and adults making decisions about what they can or cannot do with or to children.
Right and actually it occurs to me now that there's another example.
I remember we were at a party at a colleague's house.
You sure you're allowed to tell this story?
Yeah.
Okay.
I know where you're going.
I will purge identities.
I don't think they're important to the story.
Okay.
We were at a couple of colleagues, married to each other, had a couple of kids, and we were at a holiday party of theirs.
And Zach, I believe it was, was... I thought you were purging identities!
Oh, Zach!
Zach, I can make it right with him later.
But anyway, Zach at one point must have been He was five or six.
And the daughter of one of the people there was 14, 15.
Yeah.
And he, Zachary, was gazing up at her.
Sweetly.
Sweetly.
But with such attention.
But clearly very focused on this beautiful girl and this beautiful girl's father looked at Zach and said, he's gonna be okay.
It's true.
Anyway, there's nothing wrong with that story.
It's a good story, right?
Yeah, well, you're welcome.
But anyway, look, The whole thing, I don't know how much we know about what normal looks like, but the point is, don't you dare mess with normal, which involves Having thoughts to yourself, never explaining them to anybody, them being the foundation on which your later, more precise, less vague sexuality is built, right?
All of that is normal, and the idea that any adults at all are playing with the concept that these things should be brought into reality, that, you know, your fantasies as a child have anything to do with what the adult should be thinking about, is insane!
Again, insane is too gentle.
Yeah, it is.
It is.
And so, well, maybe that's just the punchline of this, is no matter what you think, no matter whether you hear an argument that you think has some merit, no argument that you could possibly marshal in this space is sufficient to overcome the burden of what we don't know and the damage that we absolutely do know can come from this, right?
Pedophilia, no fucking way, right?
That is a bright line if ever there was one, right?
There is no brighter line than that one, so... I don't know.
I hope we can wake the fuck up from this because watching people experiment with linguistic arguments to get us to flirt with removing protections of children is just... It's grotesque.
It is grotesque.
All right.
Well, you also wanted to talk about another thing.
I could intervene with a light bit of, 30 seconds of CBC hilarity.
You intervene and I will go through a process while you are intervening.
Okay um let's see I gotta just pull it up uh this uh yeah hold on I apparently this is recent but I don't I don't have the date on it so I'm I don't remember exactly when this tweet you may show it from the CDC you all remember the CDC right?
uh said this it's not too late to get vaccinated you can get the mpox vaccine at the same time as your flu and covid vaccines doctor i'm gonna butcher this guy's name demeter daskalakis sorry encourages you to talk to your vaccinator About what is right for you, your vaccinator.
That is a great villain identity.
That is a villain identity!
When?
And so I'm not going to show you the video, it's not worth watching, but it's true, he's like, ask your clinician or your vaccinator whether or not the Impoc shot is right for you.
Your vaccinator?
The vaccinator versus the malinformer.
I know who I'm betting on.
That's all.
That's the CDC.
And it fits.
It's like it's again playing with language.
It's not grotesque and evil, that particular move, right?
But it's another step in a what is becoming a portfolio that they're engaging in of acts that could possibly be viewed as those things if you look at them in the aggregate.
Well there is a way in which it... I do find something troubling about it.
it yes in part it is some part of me doesn't want to say this but I do feel like that tweet will only be read by people who have not died suddenly and that is why they can say it isn't too late because for some people it is too late Yep.
Yep.
See?
Math again.
I mean, it's underlying deeply enough.
It's always there.
Math is everywhere.
Without math, life itself would be impossible.
Is that true?
Yeah.
Without things that we can describe with math.
Yes.
I mean, yes, fine.
You know, there's the math and there's the thing that we call math when we study it.
But yeah, I was talking about the first, the actual math.
So I've never nailed it down for sure, but there's this quote that is attributed to Darwin sometimes.
A mathematician is like a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there.
It doesn't sound like Darwin.
I know, I know, but I did find several references.
I don't think it's Darwin, and I don't really think it's true, but I do think it's funny.
That's awesome.
Alright, I've gone through my process.
My process, which is analogous to my trick for getting out of speeding tickets.
Oh, wait, you sure you want to give this away?
Yeah.
I never get pulled over anymore, so I don't think I need it.
You're like just inviting the universe.
Yeah, I'm taunting the universe.
Well, it's been taunting me.
I think that's true also, at least not here on the autonomous West Coast.
Anyway, my trick for not getting tickets, it doesn't work every time, but it does reduce the number of tickets that actually get written, is that As the lights go on, you're being pulled over.
Instead of trying not to get angry, you accelerate the process so that you go through it and you're done with it by the time you are pulled over.
hands at 10 and 20 on the wheel and you roll down the window and say, "Yes, officer.
How can I help you?" Right?
So you accelerate the emotional reaction as much as you can, including the physiological reaction so that it is done.
So that you're through the irritation and the rage and the "Mmm, officer." Absolutely finished.
Before you meet him.
Yeah.
And then he or she walks up to the window and, I mean, first of all, you do it right.
You find a good place to pull over.
You pull over far enough so you don't leave the officer hanging in the street.
You keep your hands on the wheel so he's not worried that you're gonna pull something on him.
And you roll down the window and you say... How do you roll down the window with your hands on the wheel?
Yeah, you wait till he knocks.
Yeah, you wait till he comes up.
I'm playing at sophistry here.
You're not very good at it.
You're welcome.
Yeah, awesome.
But anyway, yeah, at the point that you display no anger whatsoever because frankly you got it all out of your system.
It's really clear.
Yeah, it's really clear.
And the thing is, it's very unusual, I think, from the cop's perspective.
Oh, sure.
Because, you know, everybody they pull over... You're not anxious.
Right.
Exactly.
And so the point is that very often causes them to think, oh, this person sucks less than average.
and, you know, they'll throw you a bone.
But, you know, I feel burned.
I feel singled out, which is in fact exactly how it works.
Right?
Exactly.
Unless you're alone on the high road and you get pulled over.
You're going with a bunch of people and you're hardly the only one speeding.
Right, and you know, you've justified it.
If you get pulled over, then you've got to be the fastest one there to get pulled over, really.
Didn't used to be the case, anyway.
Anyway, we digress.
I have now gone through this process.
I am ready to engage this last thing.
So, many of you will have noticed that Sam Harris showed up in lots of places.
He was trending on Twitter for some stuff that he said, and weirdly enough, from my perspective, what he said was about me.
And, um, well, I didn't like it all that much.
So the question is what to do about it.
And I didn't mention it last week in part because I, you know, did need a little process and it was going to take longer than pulling over to the side of the road to get past that process in order to do anything reasonable with this.
But I don't know how we ended up here.
From my perspective, and I understand that there are in some sense two planets.
There's planet, what I think is planet reality, right?
And on planet reality, I believe Sam Harris has been wrong about just about everything related to COVID.
And you and I have not been right from the beginning, but we rapidly got righter and righter.
Every place we got something wrong, we fixed it.
And we now have a set of positions that is strange and remarkable as they are, do appear to be borne out by the evidence and are very robust.
Okay?
Things happen.
COVID was complex.
Guy got some stuff wrong.
What I don't understand is why he's on the offensive.
Right?
Why is he taking a victory lap?
Why is he torturing logic in order to rescue his rightness from the evidence?
None of that makes any sense.
And at some level, I guess he's entitled to do that.
But what he's not entitled to do, and you know, look, Sam, among other things, is a moral philosopher.
And my claim is going to be that Sam is not entitled to be taking a victory lap where he has been wrong and making the arguments that he's making if he is not also willing to make those arguments to me so that we can pressure test them.
Now I will say there is one aspect of this.
I don't know what to do.
I don't know whether to feel relieved that he's attacking me and not both of us, right?
Like, I don't want him attacking you.
So maybe that's good.
On the other hand, it does seem kind of disrespectful.
But whatever the case is, it does seem to me that as a moral philosopher, Sam, you are required, if you are not going to simply take a breather and reflect on how you got stuff wrong, if you really think you got stuff right, And you think that the reasoning that explains how you got things right is robust, you don't really have the right not to talk to me about it.
Either.
You're going to agree with that, and we're going to find some way to talk, and I promise to be decent about it.
I'm not going to pull any punches, but I think you and I could have a conversation.
We could do this IDW style.
We could have you on Dark Horse, and we could talk about why you think you were right in spite of what I think the evidence says, and we could see how those arguments work out, right?
That would be, in some sense, the easiest thing to do.
We could have somebody else, like Joe Rogan or Jordan Peterson, moderate a discussion between us.
In some sense, Peterson would be a natural, since I moderated the debate between you two, right?
This could be a change of chairs and we could get to some productive thing, and I think you will agree that whoever is actually right The world would benefit from us figuring that out in a way that lots of people could understand what it is that makes that position correct, no matter what it is.
That should be true.
We could do that.
Or, as a third possibility, we could, as I suggested, I guess it was, I think it was in June,
I suggested that we use the QPark software environment which as far as I can tell Neutralizes every valid concern you have that Would flow from us having a conversation so you Sam have expressed concern for example that if you were to sit down with me that I might spring some study on you that you'd never heard of or hadn't thought deeply about and you might fumble and
That that might result in people getting the wrong impression and that, you know, lives could be lost as a result of the fact that you didn't know what to say in the moment.
And you will recall that when you made that argument, I said it was one of the few things I agreed with you about.
That this is a danger and that that's a problem and so we should neutralize it.
But the Cue Park software environment, which is still a prototype but good enough to use, Completely neutralizes that concern because it a it is asynchronous you could Write out your argument and Take as much time in doing so as you wanted and you only you know push the I don't know if it's the publish button but the send button on your argument when it's done and
You would also be completely free to bring anybody you thought was expert along with you so that you wouldn't be suffering from having less insight than you might in some area that wasn't your particular focus.
You could bring Eric Topol, whoever you wanted.
I will bring my people and we can have this out.
We can figure out what it is that we disagree on.
What the evidence actually suggests is true and what the implications are for how we should be managing the pandemic or whatever it is.
So look, that's three options.
I don't really feel like it was required that I give you three options, but you've got three options on the table and If you don't take any of those options, if you still think it's cool to be going on podcast after podcast accusing me of not being qualified to talk about things where I have been right and you have been wrong, well, then, you know, I'm going to stop being nice about this.
So please, Sam, think about it.
Think about it in moral terms and get back to me because you're at the end of my patience.
Excellent.
That brings us to the end of this week's show.
Oh, not the universe.
Good!
I'm glad to hear that.
Definitely not.
We're not there yet.
No.
We're going to take a 15-minute break or so and come back with answers to your questions, which you can ask at darkhorsesubmissions.com.
We'll spend about an hour on that live Q&A, and then we'll be back again next week, same time, same place.
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We've also been getting requests lately for, do you have an address to send mail to and such?
We do, and I don't remember it at the moment, but it's on both of our websites.
But we do!
That's the answer to the question.
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